106 Artists Contribute to Madrid Street Advertising Takeover (MaSAT)

The Madrid team installs MaSAT

MaSAT (Madrid Street Advertising Takeover) is the third in a series of civil disobedience projects by Public Ad Campaign intent on changing our expectations of public behavior in our shared environments.

Groundswell’s contribution to MaSAT

Groundswell joined 105 other artists in contributing to this international effort that targeted ads in Cemusa bus shelters in four heavily populated locations around Madrid. Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign explains further:

This time, at the request of our Madrid based collaborators, participants were asked to submit only text based works. This fantastic idea allowed us to open up the submission request process to a wide range of individuals including sociologist, teachers, lawyers, gallery owners and anyone with a concern for the curation and participation in public space.

In total, on March 3oth, 106 posters – all printed with black text on white paper – were installed in 53 locations, by a small ground team. Cemusa did not interrupt their efforts, but responded quickly – within 5 hours – and began removing the new signs. Still, most of the posters were documented before removal, and can be seen at the MaSAT website.

Work by the Space Hijackers for MaSAT

Groundswell’s contribution to MaSAT (pictured above) is meant to interrogate the idea of the commons, which has been a popular topic of discussion and point of organizing for the left these past two decades. MaSAT contributes to this trend by seeking to make public space – particularly the terrain of visual communications therein – more common. While much has been done to open space, and to start dialog, a question few have addressed is what is done to keep that space open.

Centuries ago, when the commons was still a recognizable part of everyday life, the custom of beating the bounds was an annual ritual to mark the territory held in common and to beat back encroachment into that space. After the custom of beating the bounds was made Christian, the parishes would recite Psalms 103-104 while walking the boundaries of the church grounds. The quote used for the MaSAT poster – “There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.” – takes from Psalm 104:26. These early Christians were using a stolen (formerly Pagan) tradition to mark supposedly commonly held territory, and the ritual involved much violence – some parishes beat their young men against the earthen boundaries of the church property.

Work by Desire Obtain Cherish for MaSAT

With MaSAT, we’re doing something similar – stealing back territory and a tradition of visual communication – to establish a temporary commons that is particularly constituted. Like the parishioners, the artists involved have gathered to delineate boundaries, but in this case, we must first create the terrain we aim to protect. The territory being defined is not ours by deed, but temporarily becomes ours while we use it. At the same time, however, using the Psalm suggests that with MaSAT, we are performing the same ritual in a radically different context. MaSAT opens a commons of a kind, but more accurately it reacts to encroachment. However anachronistic the practice in this context, our beating of the bounds wards off the monetization of public space, albeit temporarily. Groundswell’s MaSAT poster highlights this tension and plays with the ambiguity of vaguely defined public(s) and the boundaries of permissible action in both the temporary commons and the space it chooses to defend.

The 26nd verse of the Psalm was chosen to allow a second possible reading of the work. Including the portion about Leviathan, being the Biblical beast after which Thomas Hobbes named his treatise on social contract theory, allows us to ask questions about the degree of allowable violence in shifting culture, especially as this kind of violence is normalized by neoliberalism and set to work in the regenerate city. This isn’t to suggest a return to Hobbes, but the opposite, to point out the lack of viable responses, and that so many suggested courses of action rest on the same antiquated ideas (about the self, citizenship, and so on) that undergird Leviathan as a text.