Streets of Tetuán: Encounters with the Possible

Walking down Tetuán, Madrid: on its walls you see the visual inscriptions of the work by the self-managed social center Enredadera, the campaign Invisibles de Tetuán, the youth collective Algarada, pieces by Rey de la Ruina…: maps of dissent confronting the predatory roadmap of the neoliberal global city. Dissensus: a reconfiguration of situations under a different pattern of perception and signification: for Jacques Ránciere, to reconfigure the landscape of the perceptible and the thinkable is to modify the territory of the possible (El espectador emancipado: 51-52). Streets of de Tetuán: experiments where the possible is being created:

Taltoys/Taltos and El Rey de la Ruina.

In a key text, Maurizio Lazzarato elaborates the notion of the possible as the production of the new and makes an association between the opening to the possible and falling in love. He observes that “to open oneself to the possible is to receive–as when one falls in love–the emergence of a discontinuity in our experience, and to construct…a new relationship, a new agency. One falls in love not so much with a person but with the possible world that that person expresses: one glimpses in the other not so much her or his actual existence but new possibilities of lives created by that encounter” (Por una política menor 2006: 41; my own loose translation). To identify potencies, possible worlds, possible lives which that encounter will create. Walking down Tetuán: you run into slogans-oracles on the hearts by Rey de la Ruina: “Asomarse al abismo” / “Putting your head out to the abyss”: putting your head out to unexpected encounters, to scripts and maps to be written, to falling in love with potencies to come.