Ergosfera is a cooperative from A Coruña dedicated to urban research since 2006. Through different professional practices from fields such as urbanism, art, activism or cultural production, our work focuses on the development of research projects on the forms of use and urbanization of contemporary territory, always from a critical but curious perspective and sharing the results as free knowledge in search of experimentation and debate.
The objective of Ergosfera is to generate and sustain public conversations about everything related to the contemporary city through the problematization of certain disciplinary assumptions of architecture and urbanism, mainly, in relation to the common, the popular, the ordinary, the informal, the unfinished, the conflictive or the generic.
Our projects always have an important component of fieldwork, graphic, cartographic and photographic production, as well as public activities, both for the return of results, and for participation and co-production with interested and/or affected people when the context conditions allow it.
Most of our projects have been developed through calls and commissions from public administrations and all kinds of cultural and academic institutions, although we have also developed many others from self-management and collaboration with research, activist, artistic and popular networks in our environment.
Ergosfera's interests cover a wide range of scales and themes, but always at the intersection between the social and architecture, urbanism and territory from dialogue with other disciplines and human knowledge.
We are part of the Arquitecturas Colectivas network and we are city supporters.
Ergosfera is a group of architects (organized as a university association since 2006, as a cultural association since 2014 and as a worker cooperative since 2016) who develop urban research and intervention projects from A Coruña.
Although we started organizing outreach activities and carrying out direct urban actions, currently our work is focused on the development of urban proposals and studies on the forms of use and urbanization of contemporary territory, both through professional practice and theoretical hypotheses, but always from a critical perspective and sharing the results as free knowledge in search of experimentation and debate. To do this, we use any ethically and politically acceptable work opportunity that arises, whether from the field of urbanism, art, activism or cultural production.
We are part of the Arquitecturas Colectivas network. We are city supporters.
Ergosfera is a group of undocumented architects who develop action-research work from A Coruña.
Although among our activities are the organization of workshops, conferences, debates, exhibitions or direct interventions in urban space, lately our work has taken the form of critical micro-research on the processes that shape the contemporary city: How is difference produced today? Guantanamo and other Territories of Exception, on the composition of urbanistic machines capable of producing and sustaining radical difference; Eu sí quero feísmo na miña paisaxe!, on the qualities of territories that, after being denigrated as unproductive and ugly, need new narratives and arguments to keep their possibility open; or Inditex / City / Capital, on the materializations of capitalism through the case of Inditex in metropolitan A Coruña.
The critical positioning of these practices-theories is based on our condition as architects in a context in which the State and the Market are laughable institutions without the capacity to think about issues such as difference, desire, injustice or freedom. Responding to bankers, professors, speculators or councilors of citizen security, we almost see ourselves as urbanistic terrorists. Responding to Koolhaas, we are simply "supporters" of the city. An activity, of course, unpaid for now.
Ergosfera is a university association of architecture students with the following objectives:
1.- To promote the bidirectional relationship between ETSAC and the city to enable both the involvement of students in the reality around us, and the opening of new discussion forums where citizens can access less mediated information about the forms and means of contemporary construction of their environment.
2.- To generate the internal debate that we consider necessary for the emergence at ETSAC of an academic environment more linked to research than to unquestionable dogmas, encouraging the inclusion in teaching systems of activities related to experimentation as a complement to the acquisition of knowledge.
3.- To express our disagreement with the current forms of city construction, to achieve the opening of the field of alternatives for citizens' demand and knowledge about the transformation of their environment, through the realization of direct actions on the city that involve debate and manipulation of established public programs.
4.- To reflect critically, skeptically and unprejudicedly on urban and architectural issues of interest in the contemporary world, both from the disciplinary point of view, and, above all, from positions closer to everyday reality, betting on project methodologies based on reflection on the city from our primary condition as citizens.
5.- To bring ETSAC and the world of architecture in general closer to other disciplinary realities in a structural and systematic way, generating exchange dynamics that overcome the current sporadic and hierarchical micro-relationships, so that the professional role of the architect in the present is put in the forefront of debate, the conventional and enslaving vision that defines us only as problem solvers is modified, and a certain positioning as producers of potentially problematic areas for the establishment is made viable.
6.- To evaluate the legal and conceptual supports that directly shape urban activities, systematically studying both the relevance of laws and ordinances, as well as alternative uses and unregulated activities that transform public space, understood not simply from a romantic perspective, but as training mechanisms for carrying out interventions in the city.
7.- To investigate the conceptualization of a new aesthetic beyond homologated canons, based both on contemporary material culture, increasingly immersed in the synthetic and digital world, and on the development of sustainable strategies that serve as a cultural way out for part of the waste generated by our lifestyles and the productive systems on which they are based.