COL N CALL CENTRE (Public art commission, Madrid Abierto, 2005-2006)Collaborators : Maki Portilla Kawamura - Tadanori Yamaguchi We believe that Plaza de Col n in central Madrid should maintain the communicative character we attribute to the person it is named after. Now, more than five centuries after that first contact, we suggest using this agora to highlight the contemporary state of relationships between Europe and Latin America. The entangled social melting pot of Madrid contains new emerging communities, consisting chiefly of immigrants from Latin American. In our communication society, call centres perform a catalytic function for the recently arrived communities. They are the physical vortices of an indefinite but dense mesh of local relationships, and also a medium of global relationships. The proposal consisted of a free call centre to Latin America located in Plaza de Col n during February 2006. This project seeks to explore collateral aspects to the object (the call centre) itself: how news of its existence spread, how its use is organized, parallel activities that may spring up around it, the opening hours it will have (probably nocturnal), and so on... A summary book of the project was published by Fundaci n Telef nica in January 2007.
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