EL MADRILEÑO DEL AÑO (MADRID S RESIDENT OF THE YEAR)

Madrid has more than five million residents, and any of them may be chosen “El madrileño del año” (Resident of the Year). However, only one has been chosen. To do this, La noche en blanco set up the website www.elmadrileñodelaño.es, through which any person may run as a candidate to be the face of the city. And after a million votes, Alberto Santander Martínez has been elected by popular vote as the Madrid Resident of the Year.

On La noche en blanco, the citizens who take to the streets of Madrid will have the chance to become thousands of doubles of the Madrid Resident of the Year through no fewer than 25,000 Alberto Santander masks, which will be distributed throughout the city. On the back side of the masks there will be instructions for participating in a host of actions, games and activities, both scheduled and spontaneous, related to the biography of the winning candidate. Are you up for the game? PKMN explains the meaning of this collective action by appealing to Andy Warhol’s famous fifteen minutes and claiming them for anonymous citizens in an entertaining, popular and participatory vein.

PKMN  [pac-man] is an office and collective of architects that emerged in Madrid in 2006, made up of Carmelo Rodríguez, Rocío Pina, Enrique Espinosa, David Pérez and Diana Hernández, all of them ETSAM graduates. They are explorers of fields related to technology-typology-construction, and simultaneously seekers of other architectural realms that link citizenship, pedagogy, play, action and city. They have conducted a variety of disparate projects, like Ciudad crea ciudad, Oficina gratuita de arquitectura, Teruelog, Europan and Innopia. They have won 16 national and international prizes. Today they are constructing Innopia, experimenting with a new typology of industrialised construction, and along with Mi5 they are constructing the Nueva plaza del Mercado (New Market Square) in Teruel. Simultaneously, they are continuing with their popular project Ciudad crea ciudad (City Creates City), seeking new locations, opportunities and pretexts.