Agostamiento (Withered). Abierto x Obras.

Exhibition / Installation / Public Space
Madrid, Spain
2016

Basurama proposes an interior landscape for Abierto por Obras. It has been extracted from the plantation of 7000 sunflowers it has cultivated on Gran Vía del Sureste Avenue during the summer of 2016 with the community of the Ensanche de Vallecas area on the very southeasternmost edge of Madrid. An impossible public space welcoming everyone for a chat and a few sunflower seeds. (Sunflower seeds are one of the most popular snacks in Spain and have served as the cheapest form of entertainment for decades).

What was to be the main boulevard of the 60 meter- wide avenue is actually a secluded terrain vague of 350 mts long and 30 mts wide that has been standing there for years, waiting for a plan that is not to be completed. It is one of the many leftovers that the 2002- 2007 housing bubble left in Madrid when it bursted. A bleakly heartbreaking and unsettling urban landscape, set out to be and reinvented as an agricultural landscape, becomes a meeting place, producing both crops and relations.

Among the leftovers of the new city, there are people living, who have decided to take their lives and their communities in their own hands, taking care of them and its public spaces. When in August is time to plough, the cycle of life and inflorescence gives way to an space for life to be built and shared.

Photos of the process

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