Urban Performances: Artistic Form and Urban Interventions

Abstract

The study presents a theoretical reflection on urban interventions through an artistic performance, not delimiting values nor conceptual boundaries for these two practices. An action, called 'Reframing the City', performed in the center of São Paulo during 2016 and 2017, is especially observed. The author-performer silently conducts a classic frame for paintings, through streets and avenues of the city, a device that deflagrates unpredictable events and interactions. The objective is to investigate the political and aesthetic dimensions of interventions in the urban space to understand latent cultural resilience in the productive and cultural practices that involve the relationship between the body and the city. It is also hoped to develop new ways of thinking, conceptually and physically, the contemporary phenomenon of the presence of a dissonant body in the public spaces of the city. It is questioned to what extent these unprecedented actions have the power to establish alternative singularities to the dominant processes of subjectivation that model, frame or even preset behaviors, looks, spaces and therefore thoughts.