For some time now, for many Venezuelans, reinvention is the way forward. The difficulty –the humanitarian crisis– has forced creative responses among many diverse people, not only for finding different means of livelihood on a daily basi, but also in their own reconnection with the space in which they live.
The civil association Ciudad Laboratorio is harnessing the confinement and quarantine measures to redirect the idea of the city towards the minimum: the street, the adjacent blocks and corners, the activities nearby.
“We decided to stop short of this emergency and invite you to observe what is happening out there. The idea is to ask you to come with us to work from the smallest, from the closest, and in this way achieve small but significant transformations,”Diana Chollet, from the Laboratory City team, said.
So, on April 28 they began a free express workshop, which will continue until the end of May. It is called “Thinking the Night, Acting from Nearby”.
The workshop is held in collaboration with the UCAB/Prodiseño Diploma in Design and Social Innovation, which has been running for six years now, and the UCAB Cultural Centre and the Laboratorio Ciudadano association.
Registration is now closed. The workshop is bearing its first fruits.
The first exercise has already been carried out. They asked the workshop participants — who also include residents of cities in other countries — to draw a map of their street and surrounding areas by heart, with their names, the names of their buildings, the trees they remember, the shops.
“We are interested in the map that emerges from your memory,” the exercise proposes–. If it is “crooked”, if it looks “ugly” or incomplete: that is your map (sometimes official maps deliberately forget to represent spaces). (…) Get in and out of it. Play. Work it to the level of detail you consider. (…) Sometimes we remember the streets, the corners and the plot first. We may remember an event. Or there are elements that appear first to allow us to triangulate: a cafeteria, the bakery, a façade, the man who is always looking out of the window, the corner of the garbage trash”.
The results of the first exercise were published in social media, under the hashtag #DesdeLoCercanoEjercicios.
From Caracas, colorful sketches came out with lifelong cafeteria, the Guaire River, the school, and an elaborate and well-drawn map with the fruit truck on a corner of Las Palmas Avenue, with the car wash and an arrow looking north to the mountain of El Ávila. There is a giant hole in the map on the corner of Socorro Street with Fuerzas Armadas Avenue, and unoccupied premises in the surroundings. One participant created a model made with corks:
From the area of Cantaclaro, in the city of San Carlos, in Cojedes, central plain state of Venezuela, someone drew a sector B, a sector D, fruit trees and a delicatessen, so fashionable in Venezuela nowadays.
From Bogotá, one woman drew black and white squares, 17 trees, a cross as a symbol of a health center
“Making the map of the community in which I live from memory is a challenge, not because I can’t detail it, but because, once again, I realize that I don’t really live in these spaces and I’m not interested in doing so,” reflected Ohkovalski about the map she made of her town of Los Teques, on the outskirts of Caracas.
The second exercise of the workshop is underway. Over the sketches they already may they have to map “people and resources” for possible solidarity networks, which are necessary in this emergency and in the latent situation in Venezuela.
“Who do we count on, or could we count on, for an emergency or to recover/transform the street? What resources exist in this nearby network? Are there doctors? Solidarity merchants? Committed, active people? Any artists, theatrical performers, dancers, journalists, photographers? You don’t have to publish the map with real names; the important thing is to know that those people or those resources exist, because you are going to need them. Who is closer and who is more distant from the place you live? Which links are stronger?”
On this mapped network, Laboratory City proposes to make a list of problems in the area and “of opportunities to develop a pilot action.”
The Ciudad Laboratorio association began in 2015 to imagine a different Caracas, taken over by their people in an organized way. That year, in December, the association began the project El Calvario Puertas Abiertas, in the working-class neighborhood of El Calvario, in El Hatillo, to the east of the city. The proposal is to connect the inhabitants of that neighborhood with the central area of that district and the city that is down there –as they live in hills– through artistic expressions.
The association has the following objectives, as described in its web page: urban integration projects like the one of El Calvario; the democratization of the urban land and the public space; the promotion of a sustainable –ecofriendly- mobility (through the use of public transport and bikes); the accessibility of the city to the pedestrians; the use of the city as an “open classroom”; the defense of the trees and the urban vegetation.
For some time now, Ciudad Labotario has also been imagining different nights for Caracas, famous for its dangerousness. Last May, a year ago, they took over the Colinas de Bello Monte neighborhood, from 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., which are hours when the city is usually deserted. There was live music – even from the terraces of the buildings – dance, gatherings and drums for the Cruz de Mayo celebration.
The association is currently building up a long-lasting observatory of the night hours in the city , which will give results in September.