INFRAESTRUCTOURS by Mario Santamaria: Waste

Cities are crisscrossed by a multitude of flows that constantly reorder their material reality. They are organisms whose in/stability depends on a tangle of systems that guarantee certain levels of mobility, food, energy and care. Power plants, distribution lines, sewers, protocols, regulations, antennas, landfills, sensors and purifiers organize the city in a veiled way. This activity proposes a series of guided tours designed to traverse the infrastructural landscape of the city of Madrid.

The aim of the sessions is to explore the ways in which these flows function and how they relate to other infrastructures, for example, the deployment of fiber optic telecommunications through water and gas pipelines or the way in which the transport of coal has historically conditioned the location of power plants and industrial zones. Each of the sessions is based on a traceability system that allows us to enter a form of flow, playing at moving through the city following a gas particle, a data packet, a wet wipe or an electric current.

Infraestructours are collective explorations, halfway between the tourist route of the non-touristic, performance and profane illumination. Accompanied by a guide who presents each of the points of interest of the visit, participants will tour the liminal spaces that articulate the material flows that condition urban habitability from aspects such as energy, waste or information.

WHO IT IS ADDRESSED TO:

Aimed at the non-specialist public, artists and researchers from all fields interested in exploring the urban fabric of material infrastructures that condition urban habitability from aspects such as energy, waste or information.

BIO MARIO SANTAMARÍA:

Mario Santamaría (Burgos, 1985) works as a visual artist and university professor. In recent years his work has focused on embodying information distribution protocols, performing actions such as physically traveling to his website by repeating the data path; going for beers around the city as a Google algorithm or founding a tour operator tour based on the physical infrastructure of the Internet. 

About the activity:

Collaborators: Toni NavarroCollective exploration through the waste management infrastructures of the city of Madrid, halfway between the tourist route of non-tourism, performance and profane illumination. Accompanied by a guide who presents each of the points of interest of the visit, participants will walk through the spaces where different infrastructures are deployed to channel, capture or ignore the flows of these lurking materialities that we call waste.

Contributors: Toni Navarro

Registration form.