This is not a museum: Mobile devices lurking

At the Idensitat Festival in Barcelona, raumlabor workshopped mobile structures for museums and culture.

This is not a museum: Mobile devices lurking. From the project Ceci n'est pas une voiture.

"We are interested in cities as spaces of activity. Urban identity arises primarily/originally from the identification of oneself in relation to the city." These are the words of the raumlabor team, who came to Barcelona to carry out a workshop Spaces, Transits and Mobile Devices.

In 1968, Archigram designed Instant City, a project that was part of a series of investigations into mobile facilities. As Archigram pointed, "The Instant City could be made a practical reality since at every stage it is based upon existing techniques and their application to real situations. There is a combination of several different artefacts and systems that have hitherto remained as separate machines, enclosures or experiments." Now in 2011, the idea that one of these "artefacts" can be a mobile museum, designed in-situ and responding to local needs is more than merely provocative, especially if we think in the current political situation in Catalonia, where budget cuts [1] are affecting mostly all of the cultural venues in the city and leaving people without access to museums, theatres or educational and leisure exhibitions.

In this context, and inspired by the nomadic life of Roma and deeply related to the current researches about spatial practices and DIY urbanism, raumlabor asks "What should be happening in a mobile museum, transporting content and meaning from one place to another?" And trying to find an answer to this provocative question, the workshop was organized as an on-site research by students, architects, and designers from different countries to define the needs of what they think a "mobile museum" should be and design a response to these needs. An interesting discussion started beginning at the first moment, when analyzing the concept of "mobile museum" itself... some of the participants agreed with that concept, but some others argued that there's not such a thing like that. At this point the most important issue was to understand what do we mean when talking about a "mobile museum" [2] to start working on. Martí Perán [3] described it "as an exercise in documentation and reflection on the construction of mobile devices as elements for an expanded conception of the museum, or in some cases as an alternative to it."

Among the first proposals for a museum on wheels.

The first ideas from the participants were really diverse: From "the museum is the city" to "the museum is me," going through ideas of using spaceships, building a museum in a boat, or even a t-shirt with a QR code as a mobile museum. Imagination was the main word at this stage. To improve the experience of network design, raumlabor decided that part of the workshop would include a collaborative dinner, cooked by the participants. This collaborative approach presented in the dinner was useful to create a closer relationship between the participants and a great motivation for working together in the creation of their temporary redefinition of public space.

What should be happening in a mobile museum, transporting content and meaning from one place to another?”

The museum T-shirt: with a QR code you can see the pictures of this mobile museum.

The core of the project was defined by a floating museum which remind us the Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan by Robert Smithson; this floating museum will be able to travel all around Europe and take each ones of the single portable devices to different cities, to create ephemeral and spontaneous exhibition spaces.

Finally, participants started the work-in-progress process divided in groups such as "guerrilla museum," "the museum is me," "museum as a marketplace," or "memory activator" among others. From each group, the result was an independent device able to integrate with the larger floating structure and to interact between them. It is not strange that at the end, even with the diversity of topics and ideas, there was a repetitive and common response to the current socio-political needs of information, use of public space and free access to culture and art.

Model of the floating mobile museum, the collective final project of the laboratory.

Events all around the world, from occupying squares and streets and tactical urbanism reinforces the relevance of these kind of proposals. As Pedro Gadanho pointed out in his Op-Ed Back to the Streets: The Rise of Performance Architecture, "In an atmosphere of social guerrilla practice, architects will take to the streets to achieve more with less than ever. What was once a formal mantra for modernism will now simply be a radical survival tool."

We can see that the importance of this kind of workshop goes far beyond the design of mobile devices, it's like a statement or personal manifesto on the new role of the architect and other practices, on how can we work together to resolve the paradox of participation [4] when thinking on the future of the city.

NOTES
[1] El mundo de la cultura reclama a la Generalitat que no le afecten los recortes. El Periódico, 21 March 2011 [Link in Spanish]
[2] raumlabor described it as "The mobile museum we aim to design consists of single mobile structures. Each structure will function independently but in combination with, and in relation to, the others, creating a new kind of museum and possibilities for a temporary redefinition of public space."
[3] Martí Perán, curator of the exhibition This is not a museum. Mobile devices lurking.
[4] The Nightmare of Participation, Markus Miessen. Sternberg Press, 2010.

The Spaces, Transits and Mobile Devices workshop is an initiative by IDENSITAT in collaboration with Can Xalant and ACVic Centre d'Arts Contemporànies. It has the support of Ajuntament de Barcelona. Institut de Cultura, Generalitat de Catalunya Consell Nacional de la Cultura i les Arts, Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and Hangar.

This is not a museum: Mobile devices lurking

At the Idensitat Festival in Barcelona, raumlabor workshopped mobile structures for museums and culture.

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