Materiality as performance : blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined (original) (raw)
Related papers
Performance Research, 2016
This is a dual paper in which I will introduce the notion of materiality as performance. Materiality as performance is a dialectical approach to urban space. It seeks to interrogate the interplay between the imagined and the material, and this way provide a powerful lens through which city residents can view their city and collectively envision, negotiate and articulate alternatives to present conditions. Urban inhabitants tend to be placed in passive roles as consumers rather than active citizens, framing the politics of the city as concerned with developing capitalist accumulation rather than human potential. Imagination is socially placed within the domains of non-authority such as the childish, placing the loci of authority in the marketplace, the state or the university – places that deal with the real world. Seeing materiality as performance is an attempt to subvert this distinction between the real and the imaginary by refusing to accept what is presented to us as given.
The Banality of Everyday Consumption: Collecting Contemporary Urban Materiality
Museum Anthropology 36(1):46-50., 2014
This article examines what defines contemporary urban materiality, focusing on the politics of banality and everyday life and examining how museums might collect quotidian material things. Rather than engage in guesswork about what future audiences will define as early 21st-century urban significance, the article argues for a curatorial focus on the apparently prosaic dimensions of urban materiality. Such a curatorial strategy will use commonplace material things to illuminate the contemporary imagination and social construction of urban life by focusing on the things contemporary people reduced to banality and consigned to the boundaries of consciousness.
The Invisible City. Exploring the Third Something of Urban Life
With this article I intend to contribute to the debate about how to study urban life. Firstly, I argue for the relevance of invisible and silent aspects of cities and inbetween sutures, which I understand to mean a third 'something' beyond forms and flows. Secondly, I explore several examples and draw on arguments from Wittgenstein and Lefebvre to frame this hypothesis. Thirdly, I use the chess game as a metaphor to illustrate the multiplicity and unpredictability of engagements of urban life. Finnally, I propose to approach cities in an open-ended and ordinary way, paying attention to dialectically interconnected processes and the particular conditions of possibility for knowledge.
Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies
Progress in Human Geography, 2004
In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of 'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more 'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the 'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban.
Latin American Studies Association Congress, 2021
This paper proposes a reflection on the tactical modes of production and consumption of spatial structures from the study of urban situations located in the center and the periphery. The argument is based on the critique of political economy applied to the social production of space, as discussed by Michel de Certeau, David Harvey, and Neil Brenner. The Marxist concept of estrangement (Entfremdung) is the basis for the presentation of Tactical Urbanism as an alternative to Neoliberal Urbanism, as it reveals the dialectics between production and consumption. Suppose the human condition depends on work, production, and consumption. In that case, the critique must be about the modes of producing and consuming and about the processes of objectification, subjectification, and material appropriation. I recognize the everyday life importance of tactical practices, and I identify the contradictions inherent in the approach by presenting four examples. They were selected according to their position concerning the center on a global and a local scale: the "Central Line Party" in London (United Kingdom), located in the center of a city in the Global North; the "Station Beach" in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), in a central neighborhood in the South; the "Park (ing) Day" in San Francisco (United States), in a peripheral region in the North; and "Nego's Playground" in Esmeraldas (Brazil), on the outskirts of a peripheral city in the Global South. These cases reveal the different material conditions of neoliberal cooptation. The tactical practices of the periphery reveal other possibilities of disruption of the neoliberal strategic planning system.
Introduction: The Political Materiality of Cities
City & Society, 2020
H ow can urban anthropology understand rule and belonging in the city? Where is urban politics located and how do we recognize it? In this special issue, we suggest that a focus on materiality might help us understand the relation between cities and political processes in new ways. Anthropologists have long understood cities as important political arenas and as key sites in the formation of political communities (e.g. Holston 1999). Such ethnographic work has shown how urban politics is located across diverse social spaces, from official government buildings to the space of the street, and in a range of everyday practices and more spectacular events. Urban anthropologists frequently study the role of elected officials and bureaucrats (e.g. Lazar 2007; Anjaria 2011), and increasingly also study the role of non-state actors-from social movements and corporations to churches and criminal organizationsin urban governance and negotiations of citizenship (e.g. Jaffe 2013; Lanz and Oosterbaan 2016).
Performance and urban space: An ambivalent affair
Geography Compass, 2018
Artistic performance is increasingly seen as a crucial creative means of empowerment in the midst of urban transformation. However, the varied abilities of performance to challenge, or not, existing power structures are often lost in analyses that either celebrate the utopian potential of performance for challenging hegemonic oppression, or critique performance for being inevitably complicit with hegemonic sociopolitical ideologies due to its material conditions. By introducing a neo‐Marxist critical framework that focuses on the interplay between socio‐material conditions and performance, this paper promotes a nuanced analytic strategy for examining the relation between performance and urban space.