Available Space or
Recruitment Agency for Impossible or Almost Impossible Projects
and Other Things
Edarpic & Oc is a space with its own laws and contracts, geared towards turning all sorts of fantasies into specific experiences.
It is an actual device located in an alley of a neighborhood in the city of Buenos Aires and camouflaged within a circuit of micro-enterprises and/or small businesses.
Neighborhood.
Welcome to Monte Castro. Population 34,584
Monte Castro evokes a suspended and parallel time full of paradoxes: though located within the city of Buenos Aires, it is peripheral; though largely forgotten, it has a strong identity; though it has an active commercial center run and organized by a solid Merchants’ Association, it is an area where people still take afternoon siestas; though everyone knows everyone else, it maintains an uncanny atmosphere.
From the onset, infiltrating Monte Castro was essential to the project’s success. Nonetheless, without our fully realizing it, the neighborhood gradually absorbed us, obliterating any pre-existing plan and enveloping us in a narrative with which we became obsessed.
We soon had our own cast of characters whose appearance we anxiously awaited. We became those people you see everywhere, handing out smiles and flyers on every corner.
System.
From Small Business to Soap Opera
The first step was to join the Merchants’ Association to give our project the legitimacy of a store and to be able to infiltrate the fabric of the neighborhood. A micro-enterprise identity would allow us to engage viewers, generating a certain sense of displacement, to slightly alter the neighborhood’s stories that had been passed down over the years, and to generate a shift in a given commercial system with naturalized rules. The formula was simple: a store with laws and contracts of its own; an inclusive space without municipal authorization to be used free of charge without any selection or censorship of the neighbors’ submitted projects. Its appearance, use and purpose would be completely subject to change.
In areas like Monte Castro, stores are not just places of consumption, but also of sociability. It is in stores that people run into each other, chat, build friendships and stories. Unlike other community-based projects, we did not attempt to impose a foreign regime of sociability imported from other practices or contexts. Instead, we built a camouflaged platform, one identifiable yet displaced, that allowed an authentic human map of the relations and fictions of a certain place to emerge and mutate naturally.
We became merchants and appropriated the advertising strategies and discourses of the trade. We attended the meetings of the Merchants’ Association and participated actively in the founding of AJE Monte Castro (Association of Young Business Owners. At the same time, as a non profit subsidized project run by artists, neighbors were given the possibility of enacting their wildest dreams and needs within a parallel dimension without the restrictions of the marketplace (profit, productivity, know-how, legal authorization, taxes, etc.).
Edarpic & Oc was a continuous exercise in the development and functioning of a project and, at the same time, a vertiginous collection of memories on the possible uses of a space.
Thus, the store gradually became a sort of subversive sibling of the commercial family of Monte Castro. Fellow business owners and neighbors affectionately called it a strange mix of micro-enterprise, mini-non-profit, multi-use room and vaguely artistic project.
Fictions.
The alley is a large gas cloud. You spark a dart and everything blows up!
In the leap from the mundane to the extraordinary, fiction gobbles you up. The store and all its activities became the hub, the site from which all sorts of fictions emerged to construct the surroundings. The store is also what makes those fictions possible and sustains them. Selva’s son’s party was a neighborhood-specific Aleph.
Mutating week after week, the passage from fantasy to its realization changed daily life into a specific moment of fiction without losing sight of reality. The neighborhood was rewritten as a novel that lasted six months. Each project was a chapter. There were a number of characters, central and secondary plots, denouements, climaxes and explosions.
It is an actual device located in an alley of a neighborhood in the city of Buenos Aires and camouflaged within a circuit of micro-enterprises and/or small businesses.
Neighborhood.
Welcome to Monte Castro. Population 34,584
Monte Castro evokes a suspended and parallel time full of paradoxes: though located within the city of Buenos Aires, it is peripheral; though largely forgotten, it has a strong identity; though it has an active commercial center run and organized by a solid Merchants’ Association, it is an area where people still take afternoon siestas; though everyone knows everyone else, it maintains an uncanny atmosphere.
From the onset, infiltrating Monte Castro was essential to the project’s success. Nonetheless, without our fully realizing it, the neighborhood gradually absorbed us, obliterating any pre-existing plan and enveloping us in a narrative with which we became obsessed.
We soon had our own cast of characters whose appearance we anxiously awaited. We became those people you see everywhere, handing out smiles and flyers on every corner.
System.
From Small Business to Soap Opera
The first step was to join the Merchants’ Association to give our project the legitimacy of a store and to be able to infiltrate the fabric of the neighborhood. A micro-enterprise identity would allow us to engage viewers, generating a certain sense of displacement, to slightly alter the neighborhood’s stories that had been passed down over the years, and to generate a shift in a given commercial system with naturalized rules. The formula was simple: a store with laws and contracts of its own; an inclusive space without municipal authorization to be used free of charge without any selection or censorship of the neighbors’ submitted projects. Its appearance, use and purpose would be completely subject to change.
In areas like Monte Castro, stores are not just places of consumption, but also of sociability. It is in stores that people run into each other, chat, build friendships and stories. Unlike other community-based projects, we did not attempt to impose a foreign regime of sociability imported from other practices or contexts. Instead, we built a camouflaged platform, one identifiable yet displaced, that allowed an authentic human map of the relations and fictions of a certain place to emerge and mutate naturally.
We became merchants and appropriated the advertising strategies and discourses of the trade. We attended the meetings of the Merchants’ Association and participated actively in the founding of AJE Monte Castro (Association of Young Business Owners. At the same time, as a non profit subsidized project run by artists, neighbors were given the possibility of enacting their wildest dreams and needs within a parallel dimension without the restrictions of the marketplace (profit, productivity, know-how, legal authorization, taxes, etc.).
Edarpic & Oc was a continuous exercise in the development and functioning of a project and, at the same time, a vertiginous collection of memories on the possible uses of a space.
Thus, the store gradually became a sort of subversive sibling of the commercial family of Monte Castro. Fellow business owners and neighbors affectionately called it a strange mix of micro-enterprise, mini-non-profit, multi-use room and vaguely artistic project.
Fictions.
The alley is a large gas cloud. You spark a dart and everything blows up!
In the leap from the mundane to the extraordinary, fiction gobbles you up. The store and all its activities became the hub, the site from which all sorts of fictions emerged to construct the surroundings. The store is also what makes those fictions possible and sustains them. Selva’s son’s party was a neighborhood-specific Aleph.
Mutating week after week, the passage from fantasy to its realization changed daily life into a specific moment of fiction without losing sight of reality. The neighborhood was rewritten as a novel that lasted six months. Each project was a chapter. There were a number of characters, central and secondary plots, denouements, climaxes and explosions.
