NATALIA TORO GARCIA

Everyday life, woman and city

Installation, book and video

2017

​

Everyday life, woman and city is born from the reflection of the role of women in the construction of the city. In fact, women live through the city in their daily tours: the house, the street, the school, the office, the supermarket, the metro, the square, etc. Nevertheless those who decide the model of city in its physical plane have disregarded this everyday life, which is the result of all the parts of the daily life. Guardians of certain interests, the makers of the city are influenced in their designs by technical and financial questions, but they ignore the citizens and their worries.

​

Trying to underline this situation, this project focuses on three themes, which are the starting points of the three walks: the memory, the senses and the body. Firstly, the memory is an important matter because the city is the space of the experience, of learning. For Baudelaire, “the ideal city is the one where the present doesn’t erase the past because the periods that have gone through have left an indelible trace that transform it in a history archive”, and this is how the identity of a place is built by its architectural environment. But the memory is also the spoken memory, the culture and a myth, about this Oliver Sacks tells us: “Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them – memories” talking about appropriated memories.

​

Secondly, the senses are the physical – biologic ability by which the conditions or properties of things are perceived; but they also act as an historic and social capacity which allows the individual to begin ordering the ways of feeling about themselves, things and others. The senses are fundamental in perceiving the physical world or deciding to not to perceive it. It is also important to say that all human beings don’t have the same capacity to receive the stimulus of the outside.

​

Thirdly, the body is the physical engine that allows us to cross the space, in fact Michel de Certeau talks about the kinesic appropriation, which is what we do as we walk. And continuing in this same logic, for Miguel Benasayag the resistance to the digital revolution must be done with the body, in this case the female one, participating in a specific action, which aims to give a sense to the existence.

​

So through the image of the flâneur we have been walking in El Prat de Llobregat with a group of women guided by these three themes. Throughout these walks we have been sharing our stories and perceptions of the city by our experience of the everyday life, creating a shared space.

​

So this project takes art to the street and transforms the walk itself into an artistic, social and political act in which women are the ones that guides and the ones that show their practice of the urban space in the everyday life.

​

The project seeks to return also the due importance to the every day life that represents the daily life of every citizen, without importing the gender. The project is an invitation to rethink the city from the perspective of the citizen, to which the body and the human mind returns being the basic concern in the urban space, so we can stop being numbers and algorithms.

​