By Toni Serra (OVNI)
This takes us to an issue that you brought up with your question and it has to do with public entities. To what extent is it public? The public sector seems to be taken over by powerful lobbies, whether they are political, bureaucratic, clans or interest groups. So you don’t have the sense that the “public” is really public because many times in public institutions you don’t see the will of the people. “Public” means that it is open, that it’s “rhizomatic”. If you close it and you start to think that people have to pay to enter… This has been a discussion that we’ve had many times. We are asked “Why don’t you charge people?” and we reply “people are already paying”. We ask “where are you charging people from?” and “The money that we are given, where does it come from?”. It comes from here. So, is it public or not? But look how the plazas have already stopped being public spaces, either because they’ve been sold as spaces or terraces for tourists or because they’ve become restricted to the point where you can’t even sit on the curb, literally, without somebody asking you for an ID. So where are the public spaces?