Urban Images: Performance, City, and Narrativity
(excerpt)“In every moment there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a stage or panorama waiting to be explored.” Kevin Lynch
How is the city inhabited and constructed? Is there one city or many? Calvino wrote, “sometimes different cities succeed one another on the same ground and under the same name, they are born and die without having known each other, uncommunicable to each other.”¹ This plurality manifests when we cease to consider the city as a static reality and slide into the realm of each inhabitant’s perception. In other words, cities are the ones that one inhabits and builds. The map tells lies in a dead language. It is impossible to encompass the urban phenomenon, and this impossibility is measured not only in terms of space but also in terms of dynamism: an elusive urban flow that never stops.
Therefore, imagination plays an essential role in inhabiting. As Canclini warns, “we must think of the city both as a place to inhabit and as a place to be imagined. Cities are built with houses, parks, streets, highways, and traffic signs. But cities are also shaped by images.”² Beyond the intimate space, on the other side of the windowpane, lived and dreamed spaces converge. All this to configure a mental `image, a sort of cognitive map that allows us to move with some naturalness through, in, and across the urban space.
The image of the city is formed in movement, from immediate sensations, memories, and desires. Moreover, it transcends individualities, presenting multiple points of convergence and becoming a collective creation. According to Lynch, this provides us with security in our quest for a harmonious relationship with the environment, enabling us “to interpret the information and guide our actions.”³ Let’s avoid the sensation of disorientation. Let’s collectively build the city-image. Let’s avoid, at all costs, the experience of being lost… The genesis of this image would therefore lie in the need to shape chaos, the unstable and volatile flow of disconnected experiences: the corner café, shiny asphalt, a child playing, a balcony, a blue ball, a puddle on the ground, a roadblock, a fallen tree. In this succession of lived fragments, the city, in the singular, reveals itself as an empty concept, a deceptive abstraction.
On the other hand, one might ask to what extent the image we construct of the city restricts certain uses of it, to what extent this work in constructing the city-image denies the becoming, the unforeseen event in its streets. This is where artistic intervention can come into play: let’s sabotage our constructions or, rather, our constructs. Daily steps waver between question marks.
The image of the city is related to inhabiting it through certain repertoires of use.⁴ Repetition plays an essential role here as a generator of habits. Questioning that repertoire of uses is to redefine or rewrite spatial and social relationships. Fortunately, the process of solidifying urban experience is not irreversible. Ultimately, repertoires of use are inscribed in power relations: there are certain legitimized uses. Against this backdrop of placid consensus, a dissensual gap emerges, an interstice of dispute thanks to the eruption of desire, imagination, play, and mischief. The rhythm of the city lives immersed in a permanent contradiction between productivity and playfulness. Therefore, “the appropriation of city spaces by artistic interventions (…) always involves the creation of ‘states of rupture’ in the everyday.”⁵ It is possible to establish a rupture in uses, poetically disorder a street, interrupt traffic to gain awareness of the steps that occur for economic reasons, create a lapse of time away from functionality, highlight the deep groove in the ground that time and repetition have carved…
The capitalist city constantly pushes for order. Bodies can resist order by yielding to desire.
¹ Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Barcelona: Ediciones Minotauro, 1983. p. 40.
² Canclini, Néstor García. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
³ Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
⁴ Cfr. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
⁵ Groys, Boris. The Communist Postscript. New York: Verso, 2009.