… When I think about something, I´m really thinking of something else. When I look at a landscape, I am not actually thinking about it. I am comparing it to other landscapes I have seen before.”
Jean-Luc Godard

Referring to Godard´s quote that opens this project, its aim is to create a link between the city involved, Madrid, and the South American city of Caracas through a series of colour photos placed at bus stops and on buses covering the routes on the Madrid Abierto axis.

Espacio móvil plays with the meanings of “circulation” and “mobility” in an urban sense, i.e. transport, and a media orientated meaning, i.e. the circulation of information, to create a visual paradox, a disguise, and to think about “the city” through the movement and presence of both.

A modern South American city par excellence, Caracas was a promise for the “future” based on large urban projects and building in the 50´s which reflected times of economic boom. Fifty years later, today, Caracas is a city which is permanently on the move, suffering daily losses, both in its spatial memory and in its urban and technical concepts which sustain its habitability.

The opening of Madrid enables a visual spatial exploration through photographs of the centre of Caracas (current images of its streets, buildings and transport systems) and at the same time to take a more in-depth look at the public character and the critical possibilities of its urban objects (in this case, bus stops and buses), away from the official institutions and the conventional mediums of art. Likewise, it uses the pictorial intervention on buses by the Venezuelan artist, Carlos Cruz-Diez, during the Visual Arts Biennial in Porto Alegre in 1997 as a conceptual precedent.

La Compañía de Caracas was born from the interest in all that is urban and the need to record old and new phenomena which define “the city”, and from a special interest in our city of origin which is suffering an essential contradiction and is defined between archaisms and the new, between that which is traditional and that which is technological, between a state of permanent mutation and unchanging characteristics.