Ruins pile up in the city, as do abandonment and barren lands.
And hope.
Cities have become centrepieces in the flow, distribution and accumulation of capital surpluses. Tourists, cars and data are the moving-meubles of urbanisation.
If no movement is to be had, we are told, the city will immobilize. For only the value of real estate can redeem and amortize that which lies un-moved. Only real estate is allowed to remain in place: mortgage-capitalism’s exclusive agency of sedentariness. There is no threat of sedition if she who is sedentary is a square metre.
Yet there is no avail in the vacant symbolism of the square metre. There is no life inside a metaphor’s evicted interior.
Against the flashes and lights of the moving-city we propose the tingling medi terraneum of a city-meuble. Against the ruins of real estate we essay a mobilization that can free and emancipate the political materialities of the urban condition.
Mobilization, with ‘b’ of meuble furnishing the concept’s interior.
The Dadaist excursion-visits; the Surrealists’ deambulations; the Situationists’ dérives; the Stalkerists’ transurbances – the itinerant city harks its origins back to insomniac times.
Yet these our times of evictions and real estate desolations call for a more radically ambitious urbanism. They call for a project that yearns not for a vision, nor the discovery nor the description of the city-that-would-be, but for its furnishing, its re-equipment with the moving-meubles of mobilisation. It calls for a semiotics and a symbology and a poetics and a politics and a praxis of terraformation. Urban medi terraneum.
Mobiliarism essays a critical urban pedagogy that takes residence in the travels and travails of matter. The meuble is thus born as an episteme of radical pulsations.
Meubles that conjure the practical, auto-constructive, infrastructural and conceptual affordances traversing today’s cities.
Meubles that infrastructure us, that infra-provoke us.
Pro-vocative infrastructures: calling forth new voices, extracting novel semantic and material territories from the city in ruins that we inhabit.
Mobiliarism essays a radical liberation of the urban condition: meubles that ‘mobe’, whose designs, folios and iconographies are open-sourced, but which likewise excite and displace the sites of learning. Itinerant-meubles for the world’s re-enchantment. Pedagogy in mobement.
We abandon the plaza as the site of political residence and take critique out for a walk. We dis-place humans as privileged political subjects. We mobe them.
Meubles against real estate. Mobiliarism against mobility.
Mobiliarism is the scaffolding through which we furnish a city’s right to infrastructure: a play of stairways, ladders, gondolas, wood planks and wheels that offers auxiliary support to the modern city’s decadence and ruin.
Mobiliarism is a spider that tenses and sustains the decay of our urban ecologies: an arthropod structure that weaves new ‘webs’ for a free falling citizenship.
Mobiliarism aims towards thinking through, but also, crucially, collaboratively furnishing the conceptual and infrastructural ecology of our urban commons.
Mobiliarism questions and problematizes what is meant by ‘public space’ today: its infrastructures, its conceptual furniture, its methodologies of conviviality, the material conditions of hospitality.
Mobiliarism pays homage to that moment of urban experimentation whose exemplary figuration was #acampadasol: experimental-meubles, arachnid-prototypes that essayed how to assemble a city.
Mobiliarism is but an urban prototype.
