Experiencing the Urban Space as the Other (Abstract published) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Places of Otherness. Strategies of Urban Representation in 'Foreign Parts'
The Apollonian. A Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, 2018
Marginal places do not usually appear in pictures. Their residents have historically been deprived of representation, because they do not fit in the ideal profile of ordinary citizens. Post-modern ethnography, however, argues that the cultural other has always been within ourselves, so many people –especially artists– have understood that those marginal perspectives must be included in any work attempting to address the urban experience in all its complexity and plurality. This is the reason why many filmmakers have lately become interested in what I call places of otherness: marginal areas in which cultural others, such as immigrants, refugees, homeless, ethnic minorities and other excluded groups, can feel at home in a foreign city. This essay aims to discuss the strategies of representation of such kind of places in a particular case study: Foreign Parts (Véréna Paravel & J. P. Sniadecki, 2010), a documentary produced at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab that depicts the everyday life in an already disappeared junkyard in Queens, New York. In this film, the documentary makers embrace a sensory approach based on intersubjectivity to give voice and visibility to the residents of that place, thus updating the politics of representation of ethnographic film and participatory documentary. Villarmea Álvarez, Iván. 2018. Places of Otherness. Strategies of Urban Representation in 'Foreign Parts'. The Apollonian 5, 124-131.
CITIES OF ‘OTHERS’: PUBLIC SPACE AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES
2009
The paper is an attempt to think through ‘public space’, working with the ambiguities of the concept, which includes on the one hand material space/s - the streets, squares, parks, public buildings of the city - and on the other the functions and institutions of the ‘public sphere’ as a site of public deliberation, through which one or more rational publics are constituted as such and come to contact with each other. These ambiguities in the content or the domain of reference of ‘public space’ allow us to approach questions of access, interaction, participation, cultural and symbolic rights of passage. Public space is approached here as constituted through the practices of everyday life: it is produced and constantly contested, reflecting – among other things –relations of power. Differences in gender, ethnicity or sexuality often lead us to think in binaries such as inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, local/stranger, etc. The way that such categories intertwine in everyday life, though, unsettle easy categorisations and force us to question strict lines of division. It is in this context that we propose to discuss the city of ‘others’, drawing from research examples which cross over such lines.
Communicating Human and NonHuman Otherness: Urban Culture, Technology and Post-Humanism, 2025
The wider spatial, geo and digital turns in arts and humanities have made apparent the performative, social and hybrid character of walking in the city as a means of creation, experience and non-verbal communication. The aesthetic and cultural implications of urban walking (mainly through the traditions of flanerie, psychogeography and fluxus) have been widely explored across contemporary art, geohumanities, poetics, social methods and embodied technologies. The city has been a key-place and idea with universal impact, echoing self/other oscillations. The current chapter explores the ways walking as an aesthetic, performative and technologically mediated practice reveals new hybrid aspects of the Other in a multilayered public space of the twenty-first century. Through selected artists’ cases, it explores how selected metaphors for the city and the art practice which draw to literature and new media theory are able to suggest an interdisciplinary method for creation and critical reflection with the Other and towards the marginalised—city as database, as interface, as threshold through a number of walking-oriented, participatory and technological processes. The chapter aims to foster interdisciplinary thinking by bridging hybrid forms of art practice with ideas and concepts from communication and media studies.
Urban Image and Otherness: An investigation through practice of installation art
2004
This research examines the hypothesis that installation art: This dissertation is in debt with the generosity, the sustained dialogue and the insightful critical advice given by three outstanding artists and researchers: my Director of Studies Joanna Greenhill an attentive translator of the yet unformed; my First Supervisor Malcolm LeGricewhose in-depth attention to detail, precision on all matters of the cinematic and wise enthusiasm were a much needed guiding force; and my Second Supervisor Keith Wilson-a sharp eye listening to space as it unfolds in time. Their conjoined action provided the adequate conditions for this research to proceed and their expertise and engagement were decisive for the completion of the work. I am grateful for their accumulated knowledge of the complexities inherent to a practice based research in Fine Art. This knowledge expressed itself as a support that was both patient and demanding and thus paramount for the fine-tuning of the entire process. Besides their input, the research's development profited immensely from the insightful seminars offered by Michael Newman, at Central Saint Martins, and also from some enlightening tutorials with Clare Lofting and Anne Tallentire, all of which came in addition to the continued work of attention and the excellence of the advise, offered to me since MA level, by Mo Throp, Susan Trangmar and Guy Brett. As a proofreader, Jane Grisewood was conscientious and overqualified, and the same is to be said of Daniel Copley, Alan Kane and Pete Smithson at the Video and Film and Nick Wells at the Metal Workshop.
The Edge of the City: Creative Practices that Transform the Urban
Captured by the City: new Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies ed.by Blagovesta Momchedjikova, 2013
This chapter is a reflection of the filmmakers-academics, who run a community film festival in London, on the process of conducting film classes in the local urban environment and the challenges emerging from the confrontation between different (and openly antagonistic) social and cultural values of the local residents and the framework of the funded creative practice.
Urban Spaces: Gender, Genre, Mediation
Feminist Review, 2010
Cities have long held the attention of artists, writers, designers and academics. Offering rich possibilities for imagining public life, identities, and the nature of social interaction, the urban has appeared in a startling variety of representational forms. But Henri Lefebvre's (1991) classic account of the city reminds us that urban space is not merely a neutral context for people and for urban structures. Instead, city space functions actively to influence socio-cultural processes, identities and, indeed, the ways in which the city itself is represented. This insight challenges accounts that posit representation or mediation as a form of simple mirroring, and it has led to productive conceptualisations of urban spaces as becomings, as possibilities, as shifting political formations. Furthermore, as feminist interventions such as those of Rosalyn Deutsche (1997) and Gillian Rose (1993) make clear, such accounts of spatiality are not as abstract and generalised as they may claim: they are freighted with their conditions of production and social positioning of the producers. How can we think, then, about the role of gender in mediating space and in mediating understandings of space? How can we imagine urban space otherwise?
The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces
The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces. An International Dialogue., 2018
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The Invisible City. Exploring the Third Something of Urban Life
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