The exhibition is part of a project directed by Martí Peran and launched in 2005 on the occasion of the seminars and workshops at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona. This research project highlights the temporary uses and occupation of public space for commercial, leisure and sexual activities in various cities throughout the world. Such urban practices appear, move and disappear, as if they were a post-it that indicates places of punctual relevance and hardly leaves any trace in its wake. All in all, we are talking about phenomena that reveal the different needs and shortcomings that particularly affect certain groups and that retrieve the utility value of the public space.
The search for this kind of occasional occupations in the city is based on two different outlooks: first, emergencies forced to live as parasites in the public space, and secondly the citizens’ capacity to optimize the space beyond its envisaged functions. With this twofold approach, the exhibition presents the cases of 90 cities as different as Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Hanoi, Santiago, Bologna or Barcelona.
It's an attempt at exploring the multiple and possible varieties of the phenomenon of occasional cities, with a view to document and reflect on it: an industrial estate that at week-ends becomes an illegal circuit, the use of the city “in construction” for the adventure of nerds explorers, certain variants of the squatters phenomenon, the use of some terrains vagues for occasional encounters – a nomad camp, a rave festival –, the conversion of the daytime university campus into a zone of sexual transaction at night, etc. This is a project that, within the parameters it handles, brings us to a series of themes of special interest for contemporary culture: the need to create available spaces, the versatility of the idea to recycle, the appearance of new subjectivities, etc.
