FINESTRA DE MAGRANERS
2002. Interactive intallation.
Organized by the Departamento de Cultura - Ajuntament de Lleida.
Finestra de Magraners is an interactive art installation by Claudio Zulian, with the participation of the Magraners Youth Group.
Like the artist's previous intervention in the suburb of Secà de Sant Pere - Retaule del Secà de Sant Pere, April - June 1999-, Finestra de Magraners also attempts to experiment with new forms of citizen expression, creating new images of Lleida and incorporating the peripheral neighborhoods, as important in today's city as the downtown neighborhoods, into the collective urban imaginary.
Finestra de Magraners is articulated in three places. A computer connected to the Internet in the Magraners Youth Center is used by the Youth Group to collect weekly images of the neighborhood and texts from interviews with neighbors, following guidelines previously agreed with the artist.
The images and texts collected will be incorporated weekly in the other two visible parts of the installation. Each of them consists of a monitor mounted on a support and connected to a computer. One will be located in the Casal itself, located in the Plaza del Pare Nadal in the Magraners neighborhood, and the other will be in the Pal·las building (Municipal Office of Citizen Attention) in the center of Lleida.
These two parts of the installation will be visible to passers-by on the street, who will be able to observe all the material collected by the Youth Group for two months - from May 19th to July 9th, 2000.
The choice of this group of young people as preferred collaborators in the project is due to the artist's conviction that these are people with a particular and nuanced experience, memory and desire for the city. A gaze too often excluded from supposedly adult discourses.
The double location corresponds to a double function of the installation. On the one hand, it wants to be a moment of self-communication of the neighborhood with itself, to look at itself, to think about itself and if possible to imagine itself; on the other hand, it wants to be an act of communication to the whole city that will be able to see a neighborhood - relatively unknown- through the eyes of the inhabitants themselves.
Concept & Direction Claudio Zulian. Photography Grup de Joves de Magraners. Technic Direction Antoni Rueda. Photo Archive Pedro Burgos. Executive Producer Montse Herrera.