Guayaquil Archipelago

Produced & Directed by John Beattie for TUDublin and the RealSmart Cities research project in 2019

Guayaquil Archipelago, video with stereo sound, 15mins, shot on the Fuji XT3 independently produced & directed by John Beattie 2019.

Two weeks, one man and his tripod (me), a bag of lenses, mics, wires, and hard drives, in the summer heat of Guayaquil. It was a challenge, but delighted to have been invited to explore the city, its people and culture.

The below info has been provided by TUDublin.

Guayaquil Archipelago is an event that includes artistic research and community engagement exhibitions and a symposium; it is part of the European Union H2020 Marie Sklodowska Curie (MSCA)project: Real Smart Cities. The project aims to understand and criticize the ideology of the “smart city”, and to develop an understanding of smartness and intelligence capable to activate social engagement, links with communities and of “social sculpture” (J. Beuys) as methodology of research. The event is supported by the Real Smart Cities MSCA From Island as archipelago and archipelago as a world.

The event aims to explore new forms of collective intelligence within the urban built environment in which the geography of the city needs to be taken into account. In the case of Guayaquil, we could see the city as an archipelago of connected or dislocated spaces which function as islands, both physically and metaphorically. The event, therefore, would like to mobilise the spatial metaphor of the archipelago to address social and political exclusions, but also possibilities of relations, in a new era of contested globalisation, and the responses given to these issues. Developed through material, theoretical and technological innovations the event aims to connect disparate communities through socially engaged arts practices and pedagogical processes.

The aim of “Guayaquil Archipelago” is to connect different islands, which are communities, areas, practices, around issues of access, identity, inclusion and participation. With island communities becoming increasingly defined as isolated resilient communities’ within the Anthropocene, they are often considered as zones of risk which need to be saved or rescued. But in fact, most of the times

the specific relevance of island thinking, with their ways of building communities, ways of living, of doing, and their ability to use imagination to invent other possibilities of sustainability are not taken into account. Thus, this event would like to focus precisely on the imaginative capacities of island communities to explore a new relation between regionality and mondiality, from Island-as-archipelago to archipelagoas-world (Glissant, 1994).

Central to this process is the concept of artistic research which includes architectural and pedagogical collaborations that can engage communities in creative ways that encourage agency, ownership and sustainability.

This project has received funding from the MSCA-RISE programme under grant agreement No 777707 and was curated by Noel Fitzpatrick (TUDublin) , Sara Baranzoni (UArtes), Paolo Vignola (UArtes) & Glenn Loughran (TUDublin).