air

The city streets have become too heavily charged with private interests: public space is increasingly regulated and controlled. We decide to ascend into the heights for a bit of fresh air...

Up on the rooftops, the final urban layer, a new and unexplored landscape opens up to us: sunny, with fenced in areas protecting private paradises, ragged due to the uneven heights of the buildings, cut off by the cliffs and canyons of streets and avenues.

We make a list of friends and acquaintances who can offer us access to this highest layer. We ascend at one point and from there we move as far as we can, eventually climbing back down to street level at a completely different spot. These routes are like secret overground channels. We set up a website where people can register their roofs, creating new nodes and joining the aerial community. We move through it, connecting these nodes and tracing aerial routes.

We connect hosts who offer their spaces with people who come from elsewhere, organising erratic, roaming meetings to deal with a range of subjects and practices. We disperse through the aerial level, setting up interconnected nodes in a flexible structure. There we imagine a parallel world, independent of the one back on the ground, where a different kind of society could be possible, with other relationships based on community and self-management practices.

We organise the Festival of AirAutonomy. A festival without a fixed program that will develop and take shape according to the responses and proposals we receive from people we have contacted. We strategically define three lines of action: Vertical, Horizontal and Transversal.

The Vertical direction runs from the rooftops down: it aims to inform, to get permits and involve residents of the buildings in our activities. Roof terraces were traditionally communal spaces, but as a result of real estate speculation they are increasingly ending up in private hands. And the dynamics of contemporary life, based on the individual, consumption and control, are also doing away with communities as a form of social organisation. Invoking the communal use of these spaces, we organise activities that can benefit and strengthen the community: we plant community roof gardens, learn about renewable solar and wind energies, install wireless antennas, organising film screenings, talks, suppers, etc.

The Horizontal direction opens up the aerial landscape, physically connecting neighbouring roofs: eliminating walls and fences, designing and installing ladders and bridges to span gaps or deal with uneven heights. We organise expeditions, marathons, dance and movement workshops, and ladder and bridge construction sessions here.

The Transversal direction connects distant nodes through the air waves: How is the air distributed? Here we learn how to create and use communal channels for long-distance communication, making local radios, installing wireless antennas, contributing to community TV. We organise streaming sessions between events held simultaneously on different roofs, we launch hot air balloons and paper planes, we watch falling stars.For a time, utopia becomes reality.