Observations Situated

Through Situated Observations, using ethnographic, invisibility and observation methodologies, the spontaneous perceptions of the participants of the exercise are collected about the streets, the specific space of the observation and their sensations and situations experienced. With ten experiments of this device of performative study, of long-term research, this activity of investigation of space carried out by the Guild of Spaces, Las Mòniques 22/23, formed by Pedro Bennaton and Anna Solanilla, residents of Santa Mònica, has collaborated with activities of the Gastronomy, Digitalisation, Communication, Publishing and Education Guilds, in addition to the process of collaboration with the artists of the exhibition Utopia Rambles and the variations carried out in the fixed events of Santa Mònica: Mutant Visits, Thursdays of Radio and (Creating) Situations.

Situated Observations are devices that the Guild of Spaces is working on this year and last year at the residency. Of course the device, the Observation Exercise, comes from Bennaton's work in ERRO Grupo, from 2007, also in his thesis, "Teatro de Situaciones" (2020) in academia, but now, and always, it is gaining other directions, enlarging and expanding, because of the experiences we are doing in the guild in the activities at the Santa Monica.

Last but not least, although it is a performative and performative exercise, we don't spread it as a performance, it is the opposite. Or at least it tries to be the opposite, since it is more of a pre-performance study. A pre-performance research.

The Guild of Spaces proposes to make one more of its ethnographies resulting from the experiments made with this Situated Observations device during its residency held from September 2022 to July 2023 in Santa Monica. Therefore, the focus of this activity revolves around an exercise of fluctuating, participatory, invisible and visible observations of Santa Monica and its surroundings.

The focus of transmediality and the displacement of the Guild of Spaces, in general terms, is situated between performance, ethnographic methodologies and analogue and digital devices. The main objective of the guild during these months of residency is to develop and experiment with the practice of "site visit methodology" (Situationist International; Hal Foster; Lawrenz, Keiser and Lavoie; Ulf Hannerz; Ricardo Basbaum) by deploying variations of observation and simultaneously enabling situations/devices that experiment in relation to how the Santa Mònica building and its surroundings are recognised.

Miwon Kwon's concepts of site-specific and/or site-specificity propose letting the space intervene directly in the results of an investigation and creation of artistic situations. The main axis of the proposals of the Situated Observations are physical and visual displacements based on ethnographic observations in order to direct the critical imagination towards the conception of devices and their activators through performative and installative strategies of all kinds.

Project promoted by the Spaces Guild