Carving (and Paiting) Urban Environments

Call for papers
Interstices: Carving (and Paiting) Urban Environments
Segundo seminário internacional organizado pelo grupo de pesquisa On walls
Lisboa, ISCTE, 9-11 de Julho de 2009
Seminário interdisciplinar sobre os usos intersticiais do espaço público urbano. Apelando a diferentes áreas disciplinares, o grupo de pesquisa On Walls, reunindo investigadores de diversas universidades europeias, convida académicos, investigadores, técnicos e agentes culturais a debaterem a cidade contemporânea e os modos de apropriação do espaço urbano por parte dos cidadãos.
Comissão Organizadora:
Ricardo Campos (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia)
Andrea Brighenti (Universidade de Torino)
Pedro Neves (GRAUU Colectivo Cultural)
Apoio:
Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia
Envio de propostas e comunicações:
As propostas devem ser enviadas até 15 de Maio e incluir resumo da comunicação (em português e inglês) e breve Curriculum Vitae. As comunicações devem ser enviadas até 12 de Junho.
E-mail: rmocampos@yahoo.com.br
Idiomas do seminário:
Inglês e Português

Apresentação do seminário:
Interstices: Carving (and Painting) Urban Environments

The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back. Well, they started the fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.
Banksy

WHO
‘On Walls’ is an independent and international research group on walls and practices related to writing on walls and wall writers (muralists, graffiti writers, street artists, etc). We are interested in artefacts (objects), practices (producers), as well as in the relationship between the wall and the city (aesthetics, architecture, and urban spaces). The rationale of the group is to exchange views and research experiences, to circulate each other’s articles, and discuss research agendas. While the background of some of us is ethnographic, we are methodologically open to the most diverse perspectives. From a disciplinary point of view, we expect to cover a range from cultural studies, urban studies, through sociology, to criminology, and beyond.

WHAT
In the second edition of the On Walls seminar we would like to tackle the issue of urban interstitial spaces. We look at the city as a cultural artefact, a complex symbolic object that offers an extraordinary historical account of different practices, ideologies and imaginaries of its inhabitants. Urban space is a repository of significant cultural expressions, a stage for individual and collective performance. The result of conflicting wills and powers, the lived city is a testimony to the power of human agency against powerful historical and social determinants. The corporeal city therefore represents, for many, a fundamental strategic resource, an opportunity for the dispossessed, marginalised or merely ignored to exercise power and organise alternative, resistant, or counter-hegemonic discourses. Identities and projects are forged within the boundaries of spatial appropriations, revealing the creative ways by which urban agents may transform meanings, spaces and discourses.
The point of departure for the seminar is the attempt to define interstitial practices and places in contemporary metropolis. We are interested in the view from below into the planning of space and the ways in which creative and resistant practices – including graffiti, street art, busking, activism, and other forms of urban exploration – act upon and intervene into residual spaces. Improvisation, challenge, and bricolage, but also playful as well as angry statements on the neoliberal city and urban inequalities, make their way through interstitial spaces, often as a way of talking about the dominant distribution of urban in/visibilities.
We would like to raise a number of questions and consider them both at the theoretical and methodological levels:
– How to conceptualise, discover and describe urban interstices?
– What is the place and function of these intersticial places in an ordered and disciplined urban environment? How do these spaces contribute to the construction of the city and its representations?
– What happens in urban interstices? What type of phenomena, events, social interaction do these spaces attract?
– How do walls concur in the definition of interstitial areas in the city? What happens to walls in urban interstices? How are they used in interstices?
– What kind of relation can we find between more alternative and underground street performances/practices and the official/mainstream cultural practices and discourses (official art, advertising, political propaganda, etc.)?
– How are practices of graffiti, street art, busking, and activism related to urban interstices?

Isabel Cardana
(secretariado)

CENTRO EM REDE DE INVESTIGAÇÃO EM ANTROPOLOGIA (CRIA)
[FCSH-UNL FCT-UC ISCTE UM]
Sede:
Av. Forças Armadas, s/n - Ed. ISCTE
Salas 2N7 e 2N9 / Cacifo 237
1600-083 Lisboa PORTUGAL
Tel: +351 21 790 39 17
Fax: +351 21 790 39 40
E-mail: mailto:secretariado.cria@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ceas.iscte.pt/cria