[…] but in the presence of place there can be no subject other than a bodily subject capable of possessing habitus, undertaking habitation, and expressing the idiolocality of place itself. (Casey 689)
In 2014, we began to work on the project Escrituras (Writings), http://proyectoescrituras.net/, a work that took the form of a theoretical exploration and creative experimentation around the concept of territory, with the objective of generating polymorphous reflection: a platform of collaboration and exchange, a sample-essay, a trial, work, a theoretical and academic production.
After an open call for projects – “Buenos Aires site-specific” – by the gov-ernment of the city of Buenos Aires, which proposed interventions in five places in Buenos Aires, we decided to devise a proposal for the space in the district of La Boca, which was subsequently selected to be developed and implemented.
La Boca is a space that throughout its history, with the arrival of immigrants, has been in permanent tension. Today, it is a district in which conflict persists because of the diversity of the social groups that live there: disadvantaged areas exist alongside middle-class areas and, more recently, high society. Highly eclectic and heterodox, it is an area which at present is being transformed because the land there is very valuable and, as a result, there is a whole sector with considerable wealth that now looks at La Boca as a place for investment. As in all gentrified areas, that process implies implicit and explicit violence.
In the preselected zone in which were going to intervene – five blocks of the Pérez Galdós Avenue, an urban artery that would host textualities and that, coincidently, bears the name of the Spanish writer and playwright – a sort of break also becomes evident. There is a central artery that divides, almost in a Galdosian style, what some of the residents want to keep separate: “On this side we are one thing, on the other side they are something else.” That avenue is a giant crack, like a channel that separates what each one of its inhabitants thinks about their particular territory. So, the challenge was to generate a group and community dynamic in this place of friction.
Discovering the layers that are less visible in the urban sphere implied activating drift processes of uncovering.