Suburbia, Interrupted: Street Art and the Politics of Place in the Paris banlieues' (original) (raw)
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(De)Facing the Suburbs: Street Art and the Politics of Spatial Affect in the Paris banlieues
This essay takes the strands of aesthetics, politics and affect to examine the interrelation between street art and urban renewal in re-making ‘place’ in the Paris banlieues. If recent French policies of decentralization and urban ‘renewal’ or ‘renovation’ present opportunities to rethink the affective terrains defining the banlieues’ relationship to the capital, they also present the need to resituate cultural production within the context of the territorial disturbance of suburban renewal. In this exploratory piece, I want to look at one aesthetic ‘refrain’ in particular – the human face in the ‘photograff’ (a photographic form of street art, a linguistic blend of ‘photograph’ and ‘graffiti’) – to suggest how the face in the urban environment invites an affective approach to considering the spatialities emergent at the edge of the intra muros city. It is the affective interrelation between the human face in street art and spatialities of renewal in suburban Paris that is at the heart of this discussion, where spatiality is understood to mean the relatively grounded and constructed series of socionatural processes in which humans participate and which, mutually, shape what happens in space. The affective relation that ensues from the encounter with the human face, postered and pasted onto the walls of a suburb undergoing renewal and within the greater context of the Inside Out project, brings into view a moving interaction of urban artefacts, histories and aesthetic sensibilities – what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari will term ‘la ritournelle’, the refrain – which, while these may anchor the ‘virtual synesthetic perspectives’ that constitute affect, at the same time, open onto a myriad of potential encounters between people in public; or, better, they open onto a politics.
Art’s practical place in reconstituting the urban space as one of the defining elements of urban culture renders a twofold role. The role of art in the neoliberal urban planning shows that art is an integral part of current capitalist processes that are turning the neoliberal art subject in a source of capital—both as a resource for tourism and a real estate investment. However, recent research has found that arts and art establishments are not as significant in gentrification processes as before (Grodach, Fostor, Murdoch 2018). Indeed, art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city through the processes of new urban planning. For example, a growing resistance against neoliberal urbanism in Europe (Colomb & Novy 2016) demonstrates the relationship of artist communities and neighborhood organizations and challenges the prescriptive approaches to art’s role in neoliberal aestheticization.
Ethnography, 2008
This article examines interstices in the urban fabric using the example of two urban leftover spaces in Paris. The article first analyzes the institutional mode of treating these spaces, which explains the `framing' of the interstice as a temporary functionless space. It shows how interstices are not only institutionally created and controlled, as opposed to free, but also find a functional place as a temporary margin of maneuver in a process of decay, recycling and renewal enforced by landlords, the police and maintenance teams. Second, the article examines the improvised modes of action developed by diverse people in order to use the interstice. The article looks at what happens in the gaps of urban planning, when activities find a place in the interstice not in order to transform it, and bring it back into the realm of urban places, but to take advantage of its `in-between' position in the city. In practice, such activities are led by individuals who have to be `just passing', because the frame (Goffman, 1974) built by landlords and their agents prevents them from taking place. Under some conditions, `just passing' can give way to another type of involvement described as `out of frame', which in this case, allows a group of homeless people to settle in the interstice for a more durable period of time despite heavy surveillance.
Conference Catalog, 2019
urban space, art, and social movements 2 2 Rebel streets : urban space, art, and social movements Art's presence in the urban space is dynamic and interactive that communicates the complex forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and plurality in contemporary daily life-where we experience politics. The new forms of agencies and strategies of urban creativity in the form of graffiti, wall paintings, yarn bombing, stickers, urban gardening, street performances, tactical art, creative campaigns and theatrical actions-among others-demand an active spectatorship and have a growing power to renegotiate space for new forms of political participation in the urban space.
Speculating on (the) urban (of) art: (un)siting street art in the age of neoliberal urbanisation
Horizontes Antropologicos, 2019
This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. This is done in three steps. First, via a perambulating immersion into the complexity of a specific site. Second, via a critical engagement with the form and politics of contemporary street art. Third, via a strategic speculation on the relation between the notions of art, urban and site. Street art’s current impasse, I argue, paradoxically depends on its incapacity to become properly urban. A urban-specific street art, I contend, is not a decorative veneer nor an enchanting disruption to dramatic processes of urbanisation: it is a force-field in which these processes are made visible, experienceable, and thus called into question. The ‘Olympic’ works of JR and Kobra in Rio de Janeiro, and the iconoclastic performance by Blu in Berlin, are used to illustrate and complement the argument.
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Progress in Human Geography, 2018
This paper interrogates the political potential of socially engaged art within an urban setting. Grounded in Lefebvrian and neo-Marxist critical urban theory, this political potential is examined according to three analytics that mark the definition of ‘politics’ in this context: the (re)configuration of urban space, the (re)framing of a particular sphere of experience and the (re)thinking of what is taken-for-granted. By bringing together literatures from a range of academic domains, these analytics are used to examine 1) how socially engaged art may expand our understanding of the link between the material environment and the production of urban imaginaries and meanings, and 2) how socially engaged art can open up productive ways of thinking about and engaging with urban space.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, capitalism – in particular its latest evolution, which the French theorist Henri Lefebvre calls “neocapitalism” – imposed its dominance over the space of modern cities (Production 8). This article aims to elucidate the way in which two modes of opposition to the neocapitalist domination of space, namely Western European street art and Henri Lefebvre’s theory, affect citizens’ experience of space. Throughout this article, it will become clear that Lefebvre and Western European street art share similar strategies of spatial resistance, based on the reconfiguration of what Lefebvre describes as the individual’s experience of the “perceived” and “conceived space” (38). However, what I call the paradox of visibility faced by these two figures of contestation casts doubt upon their ability to allow for a re-appropriation of the city space by its citizens. This will precipitate a questioning of their efficiency as strategies of spatial resistance.
Geography Research Forum, 2018
Today, overlapping mobilities and displacements are creating new kinds of urban spaces, as well as new kinds of urban subjectivity. The circulation of people, ideas, capital and imagery undermines the cityscape's ability to mediate feelings of collective citizenship, and notions of 'improvement' that inform the making and maintenance of urban landscapes. This erosion is significant in a city like Paris, where the cityscape has historically been used to cultivate feelings of republican citizenship. Despite the converging 'post-historical' effects of neo-liberalism and immigration, Paris' government strives to provide an urban landscape that ensures 'equal access for all and appropriation by none', while still meeting sustainability goals. At Jardins D'Eole, programming, design and construction gave agency to an unprecedented array of stakeholders while avoiding identity politics. Although the park has promoted the coexistence of multiple publics and new forms of environmental citizenship, these achievements have been challenged by translocal forces. A Foucauldian lens of 'governmentality' suggests these tensions, and their resolution, might originate in how urbanites' understandings of the 'city-as-transformed -nature' involves a détente between the temporal understandings produced by historical narratives and those produced by daily life. Rather than a failure of governmentality, Jardins d'Eole offers new ways of conceptualizing linkages between the state, urban landscape, and futurity.
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City, Territory and Architecture, 2014
Following in the footsteps of seminal studies like E. W. Soja Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000) or Miwon Kwon One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (2004), this article constitutes a contribution to our current understanding of contemporary societies, more specifically to the shaping of urban identities and the role of contemporary art when revealing the most current and ubiquitous mechanisms of cultural hegemony at the terrain of the visual arts. The interpretation is rooted in the analysis of concepts such as the site-specificity component of the works he discusses through the paper. To sum up, the article supposes a revision of historical and social aspects of public art, in which the language of hermeneutics intends to challenge rather than validate Modernity's set of discourses of what public art is mean to serve. The monster of public art: Kitsch Public art is the child of the postmodern condition. And the first and natural reaction against "geometric" urban
Visual Resources, 2010
The photography and filmmaking of Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster (b. 1965) depict derelict zones and dedicated spaces of social interaction in the built environment as intervals of stasis, anticipation, and vacancy. Questioning the physical cohesiveness of the postcolonial, globalized city, Gonzalez‐Foerster employs techniques of surveillance, social research, travelogue, and destination marketing. This article considers her representations of social space and subjective experience by examining her collection of films, Parc Central (2006), and book of photographs, Alphavilles? (2004). While the films often highlight monuments and landmarks as estranged, overdetermined places of expectation and transition, her photographs emphasize peripheral spaces as interchangeable signs in the visual lexicon of urban development. Drawing on the theories of D. W. Winnicott, Henri Lefebvre, and others, this article frames these choices as a negotiation of the limits of constructing representations of the urban experience in the face of the city’s growing homogenization and fragmentation across physical and virtual terrains.
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