HERITAGE AND POSSIBLE HERITAGE

This is the title of an initiative of the University Antonio Nariño (Bogotá) driven by Dra. Liliana Fracasso.

Characteristic of this event is that you can attend in person and online. A global face to  face, trying to answer a question: can artistic practices  build places?

We will participate Research Center. In any case, our answer to the question is NO. They can not. It’s time for the qualifiers. almost two hundred years ago the Enlightenment argued that education [converted into compulsory education] change the world because people change through education. We know for a fact that this has not happened.
almost a hundred years ago, the Modern Movement in architecture believed at face value, the transformation and improvement of the built environment would change people. Now, we know that this has not been the case.
We have claimed many times that neither art nor architecture, nor the various actions of the Humanities and Social Sciences, by themselves, could “produce” [we prefer to use produce instead of building] places. History has shown that failure, both compulsory education and the Modern Architecture, with its messianic visions, they were not able to generate this “new citizen” capable of contributing to a better world.

Producing the place [place-making some call it] is a complex, polyhedral and highly political process. To introduce elements of landscape construction, the environment or housing as such may have an innovative and progressive, is not enough to, in reality, producing places.

In any case, as urban history shows, especially in cities that have chosen public space as key urban cohesion element, to build a healthy, beautiful and even artistic environment is a contributing factor to the possible social constructions of place.

In short, as happened with the practices related to urban renewal, artistic practices can be coupled to the public space, so being  material practices of co-production of the place. Will be the social processes [including policy, social relations, work and so on] those that will operate [through new ways of urban governance] on what artistically we try to build and if we’re lucky, the place will appear, as a social construction.