Sensing the City

Around the world, the neo-liberal city pushes active citizenship to the margins; questions of citizens’ rights to make use of urban space are now an issue on the agenda of public discourse. Gentrification, privatisation, zonification; there is no room left for the citizen, except consumer space. But we can fight back, reclaim lost territories. In walking and observing, patchworks across the global city can be seen; citizens make their own zones of commerce, of social interaction, of solidarity. In the landscape transient structures are raised, and torn down; meeting places, that shift according to the time of day; the people use the city, according to their needs.

The disappearance/redefinition of public space and the loss of limits in a territory constantly under predation by urban speculators result in the slow death of spontaneity and civic engagement within this global system, as the possibility of emerging from the influence of the encircling macrosystem vanishes. Some words define situations at the boundaries: deconstruction, delusion, abandonment, transformation, indefinition, artificiality, inaccessibility, hostility. But others come to mind with equal strength, words such as community, resistance, reappropiation … Peripheractions aim to stage an experience involving the constant discovery of the process and creative energy of those people who are capable of building spaces and movement on a human scale in hostile conditions.

As an artist working in real-life environments, the walk, the sharing of everyday experiences, offer an approach to that context, using first hand information, and an emotional contact with the different layers of meaning in the city space, but without a filter or official definitions to guide or mediate the process. This provides us with deeper knowledge and tools to build a collaborative network, to narrate the discoveries and conflicts found there and to establish a process in which conflicts may be more clearly visualised and resolved through exchange, making the possibility of transformation into a more desirable scenario.
anna recasens 2008