Bertamiráns
changing the village through protagonist participation
reCOGNIZING Bertamiráns
“A good urban acupuncture would be one that enables everyone to know their city. How many people, in reality, truly know their own city? It’s hard to respect what you don’t know. But how can you respect your city if you don’t understand it? Draw your city. […] But how can you improve your city if you don’t even know it well? What do you do for it, if you’re not even able to draw it? That’s the crux of the matter.”
Jaime Lerner
To understand how the inhabitants, both current and future, perceive their village, we will use the following strategy: we set off ‘adrift’ with a large golden frame, so that during our wandering, we frame those urban elements that are important to them (an experience based on the work of O’Grady). Who have been the protagonists of this ‘A Vila do Mañá’ experience? On this occasion, during their wandering, they have reDISCOVERED places in their village, perhaps forgotten ones.
With ‘A Vila do Mañá’, the village in which they live is not an abstract idea, nor a series of small partial images; it begins to be understood as a much more complex and expansive environment, bringing us closer to the notion of habitat: the space that transcends its physical location in a territory where we fulfil our needs, establishing relationships with others and with the environment, both natural and built; involving processes in which it transforms, but in which we are also transformed.
colour your village
The village or city in which we are working, transformed into a game board, a laboratory of experimentation where children and teenagers can act from a new point of view.
