Interstices: carving (and painting) urban environments

On walls II

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

In this second edition of the On Walls seminar (first edition was held in Trento,
Italy, in July 2008) we would like to tackle the issue of urban interstitial spaces.
We look at the city as cultural artefact, a complex symbolic text that offers an
extraordinary historical account of the different practices, ideologies and
imaginaries of its inhabitants. Built as a result of conflicting wills and powers, the
lived city testifies the power of human agency against powerful historical and
social determinants. The corporeal city is, for many, a fundamental strategic
resource. Urban space is a repository of significant cultural expressions, it’s a
stage for individual and collective performance. Identities and projects are
forged within the boundaries of urban space appropriation, revealing the
creative ways by which urban agents transform the meaning of reality.
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,
busk, activism, and other forms of urban exploration – act upon and 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.

In respect of this, we would like to raise a number of questions ranging from the
more theoretical to the more empirical, such as:

– How to conceptualise, discover and describe urban interstices?

– What happens in urban interstices? What type of phenomena, events, social

interaction do these space host?

– How do walls concur in the definition of interstitial areas in the city? What
happens to walls in urban interstices? How are they used/suffered in
interstices?

– How are graffiti, street art, busk, and activist practices related to urban
interstices?
The second edition of the On Walls seminar series will be held in Lisbon in July
2009.
Please register your interest within: 1 March 2009