When: May, 2005
Where: Zumaia
Project: Installation in the public space of the streets of Zumaia on forms of people organization and ways of representation, taking the village of Zumaia as a case.
Working party: A project of Saioa Olmo in collaboration with the Co-operative Irizar, inside the program Divergentes.
“What is Zumaia for you?” is a project that was developed in Divergentes art program and consisted of communicating 10 artists with 10 innovative companies of the Basque Country. So then, the result of the collaboration was to be shown in Zumaia.
“What is Zumaia for you?” arises from the collaboration between the Co-operative of Irizar Coach Makers and the artist Saioa Olmo. In the conversations with both parts, it was decided to centre the area of collaboration in what Irizar indicated like really distinguishing and innovator of the cooperative: its organization model of the work: a horizontal structure, participative and formed by self-managed groups of work. It is therefore, about this idea of organization of people in which the proposal ends up being centered.
On the other hand, bearing in mind that most of the recipients of the work were going to be the proper people from Zumaia, the decision to move the topic of the people’s organization to the concrete case of people and to work on how the people from Zumaia organize themselves. There had been conversations held with different people from town and they were asked to prove Zumaia from diverse points of view and to think about Zumaia as group of persons.
The project materialized in: the different conversations supported with people from Zumaia, a workshop with pupils of Zumaia Primary School, the appearances in mass media, a metallic structure placed in the Amaiako Plaza with the people’s contributions and two notice boards with four schemes on social organizations and representative elements in Zumaia.
This work developed in the Divergentes Programme (Disonancias at present) turned on how we project, how we plan, how we design and what results we obtain according to this. In this respect the configuration of a town is the result of the planned aspects (for instance: hardware of social participation, institutional agencies, informative commissions…) and also, other aspects that not arise in a premeditated way (affinities or phobias among people, groups with common hobbies, coincidences in concrete places and situations… ).
There were created four schemes – maps about different social aspects of Zumaia (affiliations and groups in Zumaia, representative elements of the people for the own “zumaiarras“, also by the names in the town and by visual organizations in the nature). These were placed next to the common town informative panels, thus another kind of information based on social aspects complemented the information about services and places of interest.
The structure placed in Amaiako Plaza served to place in them contributions that the different people and groups of Zumaia gave. The metallic structure was the internal skeleton of a bus, a bit modified, and exactly the part corresponding to two windows, was used to place the collaborations.
