Learning from Shelleystein: The Study of Urban Fears.

Shelleystein is a transtecnological and postfeminist version of Frankenstein’s monster, adopting the form of a postorganic body that goes beyond the biological modes of studying the city.

LEGEND

On the torso of a naked woman, Le Corbusier drew the portrait of a new Barcelona. This woman was probably an inhabitant of district V, one of many whom the architect sketched, eroticizing them with his strokes as he thought out the prophylactic cleansing of the Barrio Chino(1). In the sketches, the skyscrapers pierced the woman’s breast, erecting themselves over her corpse. Although Maciá’s plan would never be realized, said portrait serves as a reference to the history of cities that set up their buildings, their economy, and their infrastructure over the bodies of their inhabitants, burying dissident venues for structural development.

Born from the ashes of bodies, unseen and discarded from the cleansing and the urban growth, Shelleystein collects the unconfessable fears and desires that overlap with the city’s development plans. Such fears and desires lead to the construction of spaces which are not legitimate or entitled.

Mutant and mobile, the Shelleystein artefact is ensambled as a recording and listening cabin built using recycled, low budget elements. It is soaked in the terrible and parasites physical and conceptual borders, contaminating and disorienting the limits that govern the city. Monstruosity appears as an emotional overflow and as a dysfunctional model for rationalism and urban cleansing.

Shelleystein is reproduced through us orally in the testimonies that we give and listen to. We do not learn from Las Vegas(2), we learn from Shellystein.

From the Museo Oral de la Revolución (Revolutionary Oral Museum)(3) to SHELLEYSTEIN

Shelleystein traces its origins to the MORmóvil (MORmobile), an urban travelling device of the Museo Oral de la Revolución (project led by Beatriz Preciado, coordinated by PEI students, and executed at the MACBA’s Capella). MOR was constructed through the act of speech, a technique which served to make unheard discourses of social revolution audible.

LEARNING FROM FEARS: SHELLEYSTEIN at the IX Muestra Sonora y Visual of the Convent de Sant Agustí.

The Convent de Sant Agustí takes its shape in the creases that hide its use, practices, and modes of management by which it has operated in every period of its existance; the folds in such a space, imperceptible to the eye, give shape to its legend as well as to our fears. Shelleystein translates and tunes these into audible frequences.

Much in the way of urban psychophony, a series of dissonant pieces are geolocated in different points of the Convent. This degenerative procedure materializes the construction process of any legend. During the exhibition, Shelleystein travels through the space, tuning in to hidden frequencies and reproducing the sounds of fear along the way.

Parallel to this action, a fear archive is constructed.

Fear is an invisible frequency of the city. The fear archive proposes the compilation of the borders that traverse its inhabitants. Fear establishes a line between the known and the unknown, tracing through the strokes of what each person perceives to be sinister. Shared fears of the collective imaginary are different and mutant in every society and can sketch a social physiognomy of what is most feared as a group, much like a psychological and architectural barrier in a city.
The fear archive displays a low tech, playful, and interactive side to Shelleystein. The mobile cabin in which the project is activated entices participation amongst the people in a community, bringing the conceptual to the common and the border to the neighborhood. The project makes Shelleystein a hands on, loud-mouthed artifact for the streets.

Otrespace:

Otrespace is a multi-disciplinary group that focuses on the development of urban knowledge archives, activating them by means of collective action. It was born from the Museo Oral de la Revolución (MACBA) headed by Beatriz Preciado and coordinated by PEI students of 2013. The group is composed by: Diego G. (artist/activist), Heura Posada (sociologist), Joana Rosa (photographer), Amelia Vilaplana (architect), Ana Cadena (artist/curator), and María Fernanda de Mello Lopes (lawyer/actress).

Article by.- Heura Posada, Ana Cadena, Amelia Vilaplana.

Project Group.-otrespace.
Exhibitions.- Museo Oral de la Revolución (La Capella MACBA 2013), Muestra Sonora y Visual (Convent de Sant Agustí 2014).

Notes.-

(1) Travel Book Drawing C10 of Le Corbusier. Catalog of Le Corbusier and Spain. CCCB 1996.
(2) VENTURI, R y Denise Scott Brown. Learning from Las Vegas. New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2007.
(3) El Museo Oral de la Revolución is a project led by Beatriz Preciado and coordinated by PEI students and executed at the MACBA´s edition 2012-2013. www.morpei.org.