SOMATIC CITY

(BADS MADRID) – Bodies as Data Sensing. Madrid

BADS MADRID is part of the series of workshops SOMATIC CITY, which explores the politics of urban space and its design through the politics of the body. The workshop takes place entirely in different locations in the city of Madrid and the closing session will take place at the Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture of the San Pablo C.E.U University.

The three selected locations are wastelands in the western part of the city, which, although they often go unnoticed in the urban structure, are fundamental entities for understanding its ecology and its potential for transformation.

In these places we will hold open-air lectures, debates and somatic experiences designed specifically for this research in seminar and workshop format.

The fundamental idea that runs through Somatic City (BADS Madrid) is that the conceptions we have of our own bodies also run through the foundations of our ways of designing and thinking about the city. By revealing these foundations and imaginaries we can transform them in the direction of a virtuous community of living beings that inhabit the urban space and consequently transform our designs in that direction, directly influencing the morphology of the city, which will be able to evolve from the shape given by fossil fuels to the shape given by its interspecies ecosystems.

In the somatic depths we find this interspecies community and its political and design possibilities.

The workshop is structured in 4 days: 3 days of fieldwork and one day of closure and conclusions.

DAY 1: STRUCTURE (Politics of the sensitive)

The session will take place in the wetlands of the Meaques and Valchico streams.

Here the politics of the sensitive will allow us to refine our bodily structure so that it can become a more attentive part of the systems of distributed cognition that make up the environment. The session will seek a cosmic and communal sensibility paradigm of a collective sense between different organisms and their ways of designing the city.

The physiology of the environment is highlighted.

DAY 2: SKIN (Borders)

The session will take place in the abandoned munitions dumps of Montegancedo.

Through actions of situated somatic activism, we will rethink the limits of the entities and bodies that we normally take for granted. The skin will be the interface for the reformulation of borders.

Borders and boundaries always exist, but bodies have the last word on them: they can transform, inhabit and/or deactivate them with their power. Bodies can negotiate borders and conflicts and reconfigure the entities that those borders were originally intended to define and delimit.

DAY 3: ANIMAL BODY (Interspecies City)

The session will take place in the wasteland of the Hunter’s Mine.

The absence of logocentrism will give rise to a mode of communication and exchange of ideas based on somatic markers. These markers allow us to establish other processes to develop actions, thinking as a forest does, in a distributed and collective way. Thus, in contact with our animal and interspecies body, design lines emerge with the species that accompany us. The animal body investigates the protocols of the interspecies city.

SOMATIC CITY – BADS MADRID is hosted by the Innovation Week of the Institute of Technology of the San Pablo C.E.U University and will take place between 19 and 23 February 2024. This is its detailed timetable:

Monday (12:00- 14:00); Tuesday (12:00- 14:30); Thursday (12:00- 14:30); Friday (12:00- 13:30).

Participants will be provided with a snack at the end of the event.

To participate please register by sending an email to info@psaap.com

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