<Toma (r) Madrid> ((To) Take Madrid: Decolonial Art-Graphics) is an ethnographic research
carried out by teenagers who live in the city’s here and now. Through performance art,
poetry, video, and sound experimentation workshops, all of which are coordinated by artists
working in these areas of creation, a group of boys and girls from distant neighbourhoods
have experimented with different tools in order to explore their environment and share
knowledge of their own, a knowledge that does not emanate from regulated learning spaces
or schools. Together they form something we might refer to as research “mingas” or
collectives. This term, used in a process of collective research, is a Quichua word that
describes the collaborative interaction between several members of a community in order
to carry out tasks related to practical needs such as cultivation, irrigation, or house building.
Rejecting the existence of hierarchies in the production of knowledge, the project has set its
sights on intervening in the adult (centric) and in the euro (centric) imaginaries regarding
the cities we inhabit in the 21 st century, divesting adolescence of the subaltern condition
with which it is normally identified. Insofar as it breaks with the distinction between what is
one’s own and what is someone else’s, and it opens up new ways of inhabiting the world.
This knowledge is de-colonial. The sum of the narratives constructs an unusual story that
makes us think about what it means to take a city. The exhibition of the materials we have
produced is the result of a pedagogical experiment that has focused more on the process
and less on the results. It is a map in progress in which we remix fanzines, ethnographic
newspapers, storygrams, sound experiments (sounds that exist and ones we would love to
hear); epistemological maps, videos, and performance art pieces.