Drifting in the city The influence of the artistic practice in the street for the transformation of public space

Abstract

All sort of comprehensions and reflections about the city have been getting nourished from a diverse set of artistic practices that involve the presence of the artist in the street; one of the prime examples might be the relation between the poet Charles Baudelaire and the philosopher Walter Benjamin, in regard to Paris in the XIX century. Later on, this dynamic relation between Art, Urbanism and Architecture could be observed significantly in the contributions from diverse expressions: Dada, Surrealism, Lettrist International, Situationist International, Land Art, Minimal Art. All of them having in common the presence of the artist in the public space who acts, either as catalyzer in charge of inciting processes of transformation, or as collector in charge of documenting them. These registries, through the light of history, would multiply and reveal all sorts of meanings. This relation between artistic practice and urban reflection might be located in what Heidegger describes as the archetypical association between the philosopher and the artist that can be tracked down in history, particularly, between poetry and philosophy. In the case of the city it is possible to wonder about this same relation in a broader sense. The XX century avant-garde and posterior alternative expressions from the artistic realm ended up influencing the theoretical awareness about the transformation of the city, but moreover, it ends up influencing the planning of urban scenarios as places in continuous processes of becoming: reshaping, disintegration, mutation, remodeling, revolution and so forth... The relation between artistic practice and theoretical reflection about urban phenomena allows us to relate a diverse set of experiments for understanding the city: flanerie by Baudelaire, Dada's visits, Surrealism's deambulations, derives from Lettrist International, Land Art interventions and the recent transurbances from the art collective Stalker. In different degrees they illustrate how Art has been integrating alternative and marginal discourses into the stream of philosophy, architecture, design, urbanism, but furthermore into urban planning and policymaking. The aim of the paper is to analyze a series of methodological practices that involve going through the city, and its diachronic influence over the reflections about urban phenomena, commenting on the historically-recognized examples but also upon recent experiments carried out in Scandinavia.