The article “Tácticas de exhibición en el espacio público” (2002) was written by Jaime Iregui for his master’s thesis. It was first published on the website of his project Constelaciones (2002?2004), which is no longer on the internet. The article has subsequently been re-published at http://www.elobservatorio.info/, a virtual project run by Iregui that gathers and disseminates visions of the city provided by artists, critics, and theorists, among them Colombian Fernando Escobar Neira and Uruguayan Gustavo Remedi. The aim of the project is to build a critical network on the many ways urban public space is engaged and perceived. This text is a concise analysis of policies to recover and to improve the public space of Bogotá specifically pursuant to the 1991 constitutional reform that gave mayors throughout the country greater power to act on public space. The article examines the repercussions of those policies on how street vendors display their goods. The policies aimed to accommodate public spaces in order to counteract the nomadic practices that vendors had developed to avoid the police, thus evidencing the intention of hegemonic urban policies to place those merchants in the grips of the country’s formal regulated economy.

“Tácticas de exhibición en el espacio público” (2002) sheds light on the theoretical and conceptual framework surrounding the project Constelaciones (2002?2004) [see doc. no. 1132933], conceived by Colombian artist Jaime Iregui (b. 1956) and presented at the XXIX Salón Nacional de Artistas (2004). Iregui discusses the “spatial imbalances generated by the logics of capital” which, in his view, are reflected in how the informal economy occupies urban space. Iregui’s definition of public space is twofold: first, it is an absolute unit in which the formal economy establishes guarantees and the State imposes forms of display that systemize commercial practices associated with private space; second, it is the place that holds social flows that have historically occupied a determined space, flows that the State attempts to eradicate on the basis of justifications that revolve around urban aesthetics and, in relation to the vendors, loss of the tax revenue.

Iregui argues that street vendors have changed their display strategies in response to government efforts to eradicate them. He claims that relocation plans have failed and that the practices of the nomadic economy constitute an open protest against hegemonic capitalist policies. Iregui speaks favorably, on the other hand, of the policies implemented under the Indicadores de Convivencia Ciudadana program (2003), which entailed new agreements between the government and street vendors. At present (2010), however, the informal economy has become an important item on the agenda of the Bogotá Mayor’s Office as it sanctions street vendors and those who purchase from them, a state of affairs that complicates the situation of those who engage in these informal economic practices. Iregui discusses how art has addressed the issue of public space which he views as a venue of exhibition. Indeed, public space might suggest some tools useful in community activism. Those tools, though, are only suggested, which indicates the art milieu’s failure to take a stance on urban questions. 

Jaime Iregui is a visual artist and cultural manager with a master’s degree from the Universidad Nacional of Colombia in the theory and history of art and architecture. His work has been featured at the VII Havana Biennial (Cuba, 2000) and documenta 12 magazines (2006) in the framework of documenta Kassel (Germany). He is currently (2010) a professor in the Art Department of the Universidad de los Andes. He directs www.esferapublica.org, a website specialized in art criticism.