2011 The Semiotics of Parkour (original) (raw)

The present article is part of a vast research and publication project whose main purpose is to reveal some of the essential characteristics of the phenomenology and semiotics of belonging in contemporary societies and cultures by analyzing the way in which such characteristics are manifested through various kinds of physical and conceptual (dis)placements across the frontiers of belonging. The article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic reflection on the dialectics between two opposite agencies. On the one hand, the agency of political power as it is expressed in the utopia of controlling the frontiers of belonging through centralized urban and architectural planning; on the other hand, the urban phenomenon of parkour as a sum of individual agencies that seeks to defy such political power, its utopia of centralized control, and the urban frontiers of belonging that it brings about by means of a practice (and a performance) of physical (dis)placement through space consisting in systematically challenging its urban and architectural structure. Such dialectics also embodies a confrontation between the utopia of artificially recreating the ‘natural’ conditions of development of the urban space and environment of belonging (for instance, through the urban and architectural planning of new towns in the 1960s and 1970s) and the opposite utopia of recuperating the feeling of a ‘natural’ movement through space by defying the matrix of motor possibilities offered and constraints imposed by the urban fabric. These opposite utopias wind up revealing each the contradictions of the other: on the one hand, parkour unmasks urban planning and architectural utopias, showing that they are nothing but a travesty for the need to perpetuate an exploitative system of material and symbolical production and re-production; on the other hand, the liberating trend of parkour is soon cannibalized by media, show, and business trends that turn it into a stereotype of itself. As a result, parkour can be considered both as the urban trend that, invading the environments of belonging created and entrenched by centralized political and planning power, brings about new paths of nomadic belonging in the urban fabric; and as the urban fashion that, invaded by the logics of media, show, and commercial exploitation, turns those same liberating movements into routines, into new confirmations of the political-spatial status quo.