The Spot. The transgression of space. Five years of an endogenous cultural park by Marcos Coronel

The transgression of space. Five years of an endogenous cultural park
By Marcos Coronel

After five years of our first approach to the innermost sub-structure of the Viaduct #2 in the Albarregas Park -Mérida city, Venezuela-, and more than ten years since its re-appropriation fostered by a rampant community of skaters and urban artist, as time goes by, the cultural hub withstands as an endogenous space at the speed of its own effervescence.

The Albarregas Park constitutes one of the main environmental reserves within the metropolis comprising a stunning natural surrounding confined by the growth of the city. A large gap that crosses the valley within the mountain-range formation.

This major stitch infrastructure built between 1978 and 1980, allowed overvalue the river axis and the park, to connect detached poles, but at the same time segregated a risky and increasingly stigmatized underneath.

Nevertheless, at the foundations of the viaduct, a subterfuge of the city was created. A sort of peri-urban atmosphere, that paradoxically unleashed the re-establishment of a lost relation with the park during long periods, drawn from the irruption of a new social fabric.

In a practically synchronous context, in 1974 the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, author of The urban Revolution and The Right of the City, develops within his thesis – The production of Space- [1], a category that defines as ‘The contradictory space’, analyzing among other issues, the sense of the structures that arise in provoked contraposition to the uneven and excluding manners that rules the principles of the positivist model of the ‘modern city’.

Lefebvre does not hesitate on expose sound reasons of how these overrunning urban advances did not delay deploying a coercive logic of the social relationships based in collaboration, solidarity, or creativity, given the repressive archetype of the unstoppable progress.

“The -normal- urbanism operates as manipulating ideology, disguising under a rational disposition the alienating reality of a homogeneous, fragmented and hierarchized space. For that normalized and regularized urbanism, the significance of man’s life and city, as well as all of the existence, it is reduced to mere function, to the uninhabitable rigor. And, nevertheless, where is left the desire, the trans-functional, the playfulness and the symbolic?”. City, space and daily life in Henri Lefebvre’s thought. Emilio Martínez Gutiérrez. Introduction to the Production of Space, 2013.

Precisely from this approach is where takes relevance the existence of ‘strange’ agents to the conventional society. Different actors that interact with the city under a perspective of the constant transgression of the space, mostly strongly restrictive, regulated, or directly prohibited.

A movement of alternative makers occupied the bottom of the vehicular overpass, forced to move outside of the hegemonic cultural circuit enabled by the city. Skaters in the lead, accompanied by artists, urban activists and community; inhabited in a seditious fashion the place without apparent interest. An underground ecosystem despised by the ongoing city. A shelter to get equipped with autonomy.

The project boldly explores the possibility to leverage this sub-product of the urban development and provoke a contrary effect of the remnant space, re-semantising the essential function of one of the most outstanding structures of the city, to use it as bark and protection. An inhabited bridge in a singular way, in discrepancy with the construction of the space regulated by the city.

Henceforth, the re-conquer of the place unleashed a transformation that unfolded different expressions within this marginalized landscape. A furtive space recovered by the social force through the cohesive work and self-construction.

In this process, the actions  of the project allowed to re-qualify the vulnerable space, depicting an array of cultural functions, where diversity of actors of all sorts of disciplines exists: design, music, cinema, visual arts,  agriculture, and other related practices, orbiting around the skateboarding square, main catalyst and articulator of the park’s units, in permanent conception.

The intervention practically is centered in setting surfaces and new additions as part of the same tectonic of the structure of the viaduct, but the atmosphere that encompasses throughout the dimension of the place, comprise a scenery in the scale of the concrete skeleton and the park foliage. An operation that is supported in the epic of that unusual landscape, where the more prone idea of the production of space, is reflected in the before set city.

The project is considered an example of good praxis within the paradigm of self-management, gaining access to economical grants and institutional support from public entities, with practical outcomes and effective administrative protocols, as part of an action plan developed by the local collective, where the decisions are taken through deliberative assemblies, passing through the validation of a plural design process.

-The Spot- (Subject that is given the identity of the cultural park, pointing a precise place, with a meaning and use-value out of common), got turned de facto into one of the epicenters of the street skateboarding movement of the country, and progressively too, in a center of all kind of urban manifestations.

We like to think that the space that comprises the park, extrapolates the boundaries under the shadow of the bridge, delimiting a broad and complex territory, over the basis of an organic and long-term project, managed in different phases, once and over, during years of persistence. A structure that subsists by the right of the city, not by any shape of city, but a city tailor-made of the production of transformation spaces.

[1] Lefebvre, Henri. "The production of space". 1974