Giant pink sheep in the Puerta de Alcalá

I think the only thing the Puerta de Alcalá is missing is a giant pink sheep. Here's why.

Around November 20th every year, shepherds bring their flocks of sheep directly through the center of Madrid, in between these two stone markers (mojones) on the eastern side of Plaza Alcalá. This is supposed to be quite a scene, and it's a tradition that dates back to 1273 during the time of King Alfonso X. Livestock owners founded an organization that was empowered with keeping open livestock paths throughout the country, enabling the sheep to move between the northern and southern provinces and avoid the cold weather.

The pathway marked at Puerta de Alcalá is one of the last of nine remaining in Spain. If you go to look for the mojones, they are really easy to miss. One is to the left of the entrance to Retiro Park, and the other is on the northeast corner of the Plaza de la Independencia.

All of the livestock paths were of varying width, but the widest at 75.23 meters are knows as cañadas reales (royal livestock passageways). The width between the two markers is ceremoniously measured by the shepherds each time they bring their flock into the city, reasserting their rights and confirming the path established 800 years ago.

So back to my giant pink sheep idea. We all need something that disconnects us from our everyday lives sometimes, and encourages us to see our surroundings in a new way. Madrid, as viewed through the arches of the puerta de Alcalá, soaring up the Gran Via, has an entirely different cadence with a giant pink sheep in the foreground. It allows city dwellers to break from reality and enter a bright, colorful fantasy city.

The installation creates its own narrative while at the same time uncovering an existing, forgotten one. Like the artworks I've posted on this blog, this intervention uses an existing viewpoint, and offers a way to experience the landscape with a point of comparison. The visual comparison is any aspect of the form: color, material, shape, angle, scale, etc. The possible material I could use reminds me of my beloved Breyer horses that I used to play with incessantly as a kid - impossibly smooth plastic.

The giant pink sheep would coincide with the actual running of the sheep in November and there would be at least one where the flock enters Madrid (above), and possibly others at different points along the trail.

City Projects and Platforms for Social Interaction

Wierd. I'm finally using the new format for blogger and it's really different. I feel like I'm typing into an open void. Well...

Anyways, I'm having a few ideas flying around in my head and I'd like to pin them down on the page. So I mentioned a few days ago that I have this idea. It's an idea for a platform for people in Madrid to share their stories about the city. I'm fascinated by public spaces in the city and projects or artworks that can change our viewpoint, ideas or experience and an online public space can offer a similar transformation. It's a catalog of the human experience in the city, documenting places, streets, people, and events real and mythological. With a tapestry of contributions it will feel like the city is speaking through the cracks in the sidewalks.

Some existing projects that inspire:
Jeremy Dalmas: I've posted this before but it's a wonderful audio journey through the mythological undercurrents of lower Manhattan.

Side note on mythology: I'm reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies, which is an in-depth analysis of every popular belief structure on everything from everyday items to overarching concepts. For example, the chapter I just read was on the strip-tease - its origins and meanings. The book was written in 1957 so some of his references are dated, but it makes you look very closely at our world and the beliefs we take for granted. Many of the assumptions we make about our surroundings, rituals and objects are in fact a product of our society and upbringing. He has an enjoyable way of dissecting what people experience on a daily basis, and offering fascinating new meanings for many things that surrounds us.

Carolina Melis: A motion designer who has been commissioned to create an animated video to tell the story of the Ham House garden near the Thames in Richmond, UK. She will work with a historian and offer workshops on the property for people who are interested in the innovative garden design, created by Elisabeth Dysart in the 17th Century. The film will premiere on animateprojects.org in April 2012, accompanied by site-specific installations and a program of events to educate and shift perception on this historic place.

Here is one of Melis' recent videos on weavers in Sardinia, her home country.




The Art and Public Space research group at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam: This is a group that conducts research, organizes events and creates work and publications on the subject of the interaction of art and public space. They have done a lot of work in the Zuidas area of Amsterdam, which is the generic office park on the outskirts of the city that, like so many commercial developments, created massive empty and unused public spaces.

Media Lab Prado: in Madrid. This group studies the space where the digital, technological and social worlds intersect. There are some really confusing but interesting-looking projects on their program, and I plan on connecting with them once I have a firm grasp on the Spanish language (which is improving every day I'm happy to report).

THEN! Yesterday I discovered Jonathan Harris' latest project. He wants to create a catalog of human experience through the contribution of various authors on his site, Cowbird. Omg if this site isn't similar to the format I had in my head for my Madrid diary. I feel psychic. He's been developing the site for two years, working at various residencies and locations around the world. He used Indie Maps, which is a great discovery except that they're closed until next year. #*$@^!

COWBIRD.COM

Things I love about this website. The EXTRA focus on imagery, for one. Another cool detail is that the images drift slightly as you scroll down to read the story. There are capabilities to add audio with the story, here is a really interesting example of that. The stories are predominantly a kind of poetry, whether in prose form or in shortened stanzas. I can't wait to see how this site develops. The first "saga" being recorded are the Occupy movements around the world. Ok, but how can you beat that? This may color the site a little too strongly/specifically for many contributors, but as more and more people contribute different content, I'm sure there will be greater variety of saga.

Harris worked at two locations in Iceland while he built the website, which is where the concept of the saga originated. When I visited Iceland earlier this year, I learned about the epic saga about Egil Skallagrímsson, Egil's Saga. The tale develops over the course of Egil's long life, covering various tales of battle, revenge, adventure and friendship. It's considered one of the best Icelandic sagas.

So it's quite fitting that Harris chooses to develop "sagas" with a patchwork strategy of various contributors from all corners of the globe. The sagas are accessed on the site through an easy-to-use tagging system. There are various ways to organize the info on the site actually. By diary (each writer gets a diary where all of their stories are housed), by character, by location, and then there are many individual meta tags for each story. The stories are also organized by most loved, most viewed, and other categories.

It's a very ambitious project and has great potential. This is Harris' first project that I know of which engages people on this universal level. Many of his other projects were artworks based on humans, more of an exploration of human experience from the objective view of the artist. This is a huge collaboration with people from all over the globe, and an opportunity for many story-tellers. Most of the social platforms that we have (Facebook, Twitter, etc) provide a space to contribute a short status update but beyond the individual blog there isn't anything like this. Fast Company describes Cowbird as the "anti-Facebook". The focus on slower storytelling, the unfolding of personal narratives, rather than quick updates on what's happening in the moment certainly makes you stop and think about the current hurried state of the social space.

Play, Space and Place

I so thoroughly enjoy artwork that changes the way we view our cities. Similar to the artists I talked about in this previous post, Chris Martin and Arnaud LaPierre are two artists asking us to rethink our city experience. It's not about focusing on or changing small details in our environment, but more of a feeling of who we are as city-dwellers and how we define ourselves in relation to our surroundings.

Chris Martin, "East River Williamsburg," Brooklyn, 2005. Image via Eflux,
Courtesy Chris Martin, KOW BERLIN, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Foto: Donna Alberico

With this installation Chris Martin used pop colors and unusual shapes to bring our attention to the comparison - artwork vs. skyline. We compare the colors and shapes of his work to the backdrop of the New York city skyline, and it offers the possibility of breaking from reality into a color-coded fantasy city. Yes please!

Arnaud LaPierre, "The Ring Installation"
on the Place Vendome in Paris

Images from MocoLoco

Arnaud LaPierre uses mirror cubes to emphasize the connection of people with their surroundings, and the results are this gorgeous funhouse in the middle of Paris. It transforms many Parisian's everyday walk, and gives them a chance to ponder who they are in relation to their city. I really need to see this btw.

The installation plays with the concept of place. As James H Kunstler tells us in this entertaining TED talk, "Your ability to create places that are meaningful ... depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms, and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are." LaPierre isn't defining space, instead he's distorting and fragmenting it, and placing us right in the center of the urban landscape, encouraging people to take a break from their usual routine and play with the sense of place.

The Houses of Malice

Walking around my neighborhood you see a lot of these signs that start with "Visita G. Manzana" and then a number:

Naturally I needed to figure this out. It turns out that the signs are the vestiges of a system created when Madrid first became the capital of Spain in the 16th century. King Felipe II, after finding that the city lacked adequate housing for all of the members of his entourage, passed a law that required residents with more than one level in their house to designate part of that space to members of the royal court. This law was called the Quartering Ordinance and it required inspections of each city block and subsequent numbering to make sure that residents were adhering to the law. If they didn't have space for the members of the court, they were required to pay a tax.

Needless to say, Madrileños were not happy about this law. Many people began to build one-story houses. If they did have a second story, they designed the windows so that it was impossible to be able to tell how many stories the house had from the outside. These houses that were created to fool the king are nicknamed "casas a la malicia" (houses of malice) and some of them still exist in the city today.

In 1751, tax-collecting was so difficult because of the labyrinth of streets and confusion of houses, someone came up with the idea to number each city block. Thus, tiles were placed on the corner of each building. "Visita G" stands for Visita General de la Regalía de Aposento (Quartering Ordinance) and "Manzana" means city block.

It wasn't until the 19th century that Madrid streets were properly named and signposted with the help of city historian Ramón de Mesonero Romanos. Before then, letters to residents would be something like "Sr. Rodrigo Corral, Street behind San José church, next to Leon brothers bakery". Romanos and the mayor, Marqués Viudo de Pontejos, named over 240 streets with the names of important historical events and figures, identified with a plaque on every corner building. Also, each doorway was marked with numbers beginning closest to the Puerta del Sol with even numbers on the right and odd numbers on the left.

There are still 31 different designations for types of streets in Madrid, with nomenclature such as callejón, travesía, plazuela, ronda, paseo, pasadizo, corredera, cava, costanilla, glorieta, etc. So it might take me a little longer than I expected to get to know my way around.

Research credits to the awesome book Ocultos Madrid and this blog.