SANTIAGO CIRUGEDA

Santiago Cirugeda (Seville, 1971) is an urban activist, artist and architect who works on projects which are quite removed from the premises of conventional urban planning. In his urban installations and performances he seeks out unrecognized leftover spaces between the lines of building laws and gives them (il-)legal asylum in the territory of public space. He ultimately works with the same survival strategies of migrants, who have conquered niches in a world that is alien to them to find a place of their own, which society generally refuses to grant them. His projects, recetas urbanas or "urban prescriptions", go from systematically occupying public spaces with dumpsters to adding prostheses on to facades, playgrounds, courtyards and even on sites. Some of his recent projects include the Poble Sec neighbourhood in Barcelona, the Institutional Prostheses at the Contemporary Art Museum (EACC) in Castellón, and the lecture hall building at the Fine Arts Faculty in Málaga.

Santiago Cirugeda advocates citizen participation in the development of the city and for freedom to modify the environment, proposing creative and destabilising actions, ranging from the playful to the practical and even the subversive.. As Cirugeda explains, "it is interesting when an artist wants to do an exhibit, art installation or anything else, he can get permission to do whatever he wants and to show it in the street. But as a citizen, even if you ask for permission, you don’t get it, because you are not an artist. Therefore, I work from a citizen’s point of view, because as an architect I can get the permission required for my installation. But really I want to be a citizen. I see architecture as a social art. I don’t want only to appear in architecture magazines that show architecture as beautiful images. I want to be a part of the other pages too, to understand what a city is and what a citizen is."

This event is part of Algo Más Que Palabras / Something More Than Words