DECOLONISING GENTRIFICATION AND URBAN LANDSCAPE

The CASA BLANCA Project, a GIS contribution to the practices of Street Art

Santiago Gonzlez Villajos1

UAM (Universidad Autnoma de Madrid)
thigil@hotmail.com

This paper presents an innovative approach to the processes of understanding and producing
contextual meaning. Its main aim is providing a theoretical and practically coherent alternative to
one of the issues that scholars, critics and artists consider to be especially relevant for this particular
field of knowledge, that is the association between Street Art and gentrification. The case study is a
large Mural Art intervention (2.000 m2 aprox.) at the external walls of the Guillermo de Osma
Market in Madrid, Spain. During the research, GIS software was used in order to elucidate this
question through an evolutionary approach to urban landscape. That contributed to develop a model
of hybrid methodology which combines social sciences with the creative practices of Street Art.

Whose accompliceness? Decolonising Street Art

By especially focusing on questions of function, several authors and practitioners consider
that street artists become a sort of accomplice agents within wider social and political processes in
which economic pressures, soil speculation and displacement/expulsion/ruin of local people are
entangled in complex manners. Consequently, this article critically assumes and discusses first to
what extent the theoretical interpretation of Street Art as a kind of tool for gentrification is accurate.
In order to achieve that task, it provides a coherent review of literature on this topic, specially for
the Splasher Manifesto.
1

Santiago is MA in Comparative Art and Archaeology by UCL. He curates walls, produces murals and directs video
art pieces for CULM, the urban gallery of Quintanar de la Orden (http://www.vimeo.com/culm). He was a
researcher at the 'Decolonising knowledge and aesthetics' group established in Matadero Madrid in collaboration
with Goldsmiths, University of London between 2012-14. This paper collects part of the independent work he
developed during those years within that group in Matadero.

The section follows by establishing an analogy between gentrification contexts and colonial
ones through the approaches developed towards art, culture and politics in post-colonial schools of
thought, both in Anglosaxon and Latin American dependent contexts, and particularly for the socalled 'decolonial option'. By engaging the epistemological shift developed by scholars like
Grosfogel with Davis' theories on urban space and Gell's anthropology of art, it is concluded that
any spatial context's particularities and its own dynamics are crucial for the social construction of
meaning. So the use of what may be named a 'gentrification model' for Street Art only becomes
proper for cases where these particular urban social dynamics are actually happening.
Moreover, the paper introduces the concept of 'accompliceness' in order to describe the
ambiguous and fragile middle ground on which street artists place themselves within the
gentrification processes both local and globally. The concept describes the particular ideological
position of these creators, by stating that an omission of issues derived from the assertive practices
of gentrification, either intended or not, becomes a sort of allegiance, a non-aggression pact
between the artists and the establishment. They are therefore free to elude this accomplicenesss by
performatively and visually expressing a more critical understanding of the historic, human and
social processes that identify the environments on which they locate their artworks.

Who are the vandals? Decolonising the market

The spatial context of the Guillermo de Osma Market comprehends an area where
gentrification is happening today at an intermediate state. It is near two enormous projects of urban
regeneration that are still developing. On the one hand, Matadero Madrid is a massive
slaughterhouse that started being converted into a centre for contemporary creativity in the 1980s.
On the other hand, Madrid Ro, the recently rescued shore of Manzanares river, became the largest
extension of green area on a subterranean motorway in the World.
Since the 1990s, dramatic changes are converting the previously peripheral neighborhoods
of the borough of Arganzuela into an appendix of city center, and the effects of gentrification are
starting to be evident in the quarters of Delicias and Chopera, the ones that surround the market.
Moreover, the small merchants who manage this public architectural structure are drastically
suffering for years the opening of several franchises of supermarkets at the markets' surroundings,
being its actual occupation at 20%. It is almost empty, an esperpento.

These facts became evident in July 2014, when the CSO La Traba, a social center developed
by neighbours with no institutional support in a large squatted warehouse, was demolished. Prior to
2007 the building was an abandoned bus garage. Then people's work turned it into the biggest BMX
indoor truck of Spain and a spectacularly massive Graffiti gallery besides an intercultural meeting
point for several collectivities and associations. PlacedLa Traba's facade was so far until then the
largest public mural in Madrid, competing with Blu and Sam3. Several months before, the own
town hall was promoting murals by artists like Borondo, Suso33, E1000ink or San in the borough
of Tetun. The project went on with Aryz, Laguna, Escif, Sam3, 3ttman, Spock, Sue, David de la
Mano and Pablo S. Herrero.

PHOTO: Serdar Yemisi 2013

Map's treasure or treasure's map? Decolonising the art for art's sake
This methdological part will be written up for the scientific article. I share two pictures here
[word count: 750]

map: Santiago Gonzlez 2013

Keywords
Splasher, Gentrification, Colonialism, Decolonial thought, GIS, urban landscape, landscape
archaeology, Mural Art, Public Art, Street Art, Graffiti, Madrid, market, La Traba