
Favelas: the essential is invisible to the eye.

“MAD#sub is part of a research on the territorial dynamics of the sub-suburban metropolitan belt of Madrid. It is a process of micro-research-action on the forms of representation of peripheral landscapes, on cultural practices and autonomous narratives related to the transformation and lived experiences of these liminal spaces. We consider liminality as a characteristic of transitional spaces, undetermined, in which any new becoming is possible. Metropolis, and especially its peripheries, are spaces of resistance and new possible propositions, through which new ways of understanding culture and new forms of living can be built. The suburbs of these peripheries are empty spaces, far away from control systems: places where new appropriations and new attributions of meanings are still possible”. From the presentation text of MAD#sub WORKSHOP, organized in PUERTA DEL SUR, from november 19th to 22nd, by Sitesize and La Casa Encendida, Madrid.
There are no peripheries in Managua, Nicaragua, since there’s no center. Through the whole urban sprawl, the “spontaneous settlements” (slums) and the “colonies” (gated towns) live close together, the first protected by its gangs, the others by private guards. The government doesn’t make any effort to hide the misery of its poorest population: Nicaragua lives of selling to the world its poverty, by catching funds from international cooperation, most of which ends up in the hands of the elites.
Many NGOs that now work in the enormous number of projects of “integral development” or “community empowerment” in the poorest neighborhoods of Managua, are the same organizations that in the eighties offered international and often armed solidarity to the Sandinista Revolution, against the “dirty war” financed by the US government. Now they are being financed by the same goverments – european and north american – that contributed to the failure of that historical “integral and locally directed community development project”. The governments use NGOs to open a way for international trade, and to reduce the social impact of neoliberal “structural adjustment plans”. This perverse system reflects at a microscopical level, in the human relationship between “voluntary workers” and “recipients” of the development projects. This situation is explained in “La cooperación internacional en Nicaragua. Problemas y aspectos socioantropológicos”, Stefano Portelli, 2001. The research is based on a fieldwork in Memorial Sandino neighborhood, Managua.
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