During my time in Antwerp my interest remained on how urban material culture can be built and articulate in cities with a multicultural presence. As this material culture could be easily noticed only for its differences with the one that is imposed as a baseline, it is difficult to notice that is also silent and marginalized when thinking on identity of a Western city. This multicultural presence becomes a hidden one that could be easily removed from the collective memory in the everyday.

How can “the material” with a socio-cultural connotation be rewritten in cities based on occidental structures? How important is the sight of “the other” when looking at material culture to rethink an occidental city?

I consider important to reflect on spaces with immigrant presence, gentrified or with an abundant flow of people. This opens questions about how, through a material process of registration and reconstruction, it is possible to talk about the social identity of the city and the mixture of cultures that lies encrypted only in certain spaces.

This project is focused, as well, in certain commercial areas such as immigrant markets where certain dynamics of trade seems to democratize, not only a mercantile but a material state of things, conceived from a particular spatial use that is given to the place. In certain way, there is a tangible performance on the elements displayed for sale, imposing its own cultural origins but partly ignoring its origins as commodities, following different dynamics that response more to a cultural identity than of a commercial one.

In these commercial areas, another order of things is placed; the material culture seems to amalgamate ignoring hierarchies and formalisms between objects imposed in an organizational system of things (necessity of functionality and communication), where these structures seem to dissolve and fluctuate with individual/spatial decisions, and disappearing a “preconceived” order of things; where a mobile phone will be worth the same as a steel sheet, or where a fake jean worth more than an old porcelain antique. The concept of value operates, perhaps, ignoring Western commercial structures.