A sua pesquisa

[A1] La propuesta de la presente ponencia es la de realizar un abordaje del poemario Praga (1982) del escritor Manuel Vazquez Montalbán (1939-2003), a partir del rastreo del vínculo entre poesía y memoria. La alusión lateral a un episodio central de la historia europea del siglo XX, la invasión de Praga por parte de la Unión Soviética y sus aliados del Pacto de Varsovia, hecho que pondría fin a la etapa de apertura política y liberalización reformista que propiciaba un socialismo con rostro humano” conocido como la Primavera de Praga (1968), permite al autor catalán llevar adelante una reelaboración del pasado a través de un viaje por la memoria personal y por la memoria histórica conjugando racconto biográfico con análisis político, tono confesional con distancia crítica. Como muchas de las obras de nuestro autor, Praga es un libro inclasificable —poema-libro” o “libropoema” (Manuel Rico); “monólogo” o “dilatada meditación” (Lluis Izquierdo)— que convierte a la capital de la actual República Checa en un auténtico “sitio de memoria”(Pierre Nora).

Emisión del programa Metrópolis titulado South Graff. Pintando la voz del barrio. El programa Metrópolis invita al experto e investigador en graffiti y arte urbano Fernando Figueroa a que seleccione una serie de proyectos en los que artistas procedentes del graffiti han dado voz a sus barrios, dignificando estos espacios desde la creatividad colectiva y desde la convivencia.

What is the role of art in the reinforcement or rejection of current models of public space management in our cities? To answer this question, we must attend to the ties of all artwork with public institutions, and whether or not it questions the dominant order. In this article, I will focus on the works of the Ana Botella Crew, a group of artists from Madrid, as an example of “artivism” that challenges the City Council’s management of public spaces in Madrid. My aim is to explore how useful internet tools can be to articulate artistic interventions that challenge the hegemonic uses of public space, in what Sassen has called the global city.

This article addresses the interaction between urban regeneration and cultural policies. Planning and developing urban transformation may foster positive and experience design through the experience economy, targeting a cohesive cultural narrative and identity. The discussed case study discussed here concerns the reuse of the AXA Building in the historic center of the city of Porto, in Portugal, as an alternative to classical integrated urban cultural policy and the promotion of free access dynamic leisure activities. In this case, the reuse of a historical building resulted from a hybrid project. Characterized by fusion, the design combined urban rehabilitation, heritage conservation and maintenance, cultural institutions, environments and experiences, social interaction, recreation, and programs aimed at improving the quality of life of both residents and visitors.

What is the role of art in the reinforcement or rejection of current models of public space management in our cities? To answer this question, we must attend to the ties of all artwork with public institutions, and whether or not it questions the dominant order. In this article, I will focus on the works of the Ana Botella Crew, a group of artists from Madrid, as an example of “artivism” that challenges the City Council’s management of public spaces in Madrid. My aim is to explore how useful internet tools can be to articulate artistic interventions that challenge the hegemonic uses of public space, in what Sassen has called the global city.

This article addresses the notion of the socially engaged visual arts. The first part explores some fundamental historical periods to help understand this practice, from the Greek concept of teknè until the present time. Then, the idea of a machine for the emancipation of creativity is explained, as well as its operation in two neighborhoods of the Portuguese city of Amadora. Finally, as a result of this immaterial machine, the focus turns to a detailed description of an archive of audiovisual elements that represents each activity undertaken within the project.

Nowadays, walking around any city is a guarantee of seeing graffiti, while the public transportation are still a good canvas for writers. It is a well-established social phenomenon and has catch the attention of ethnographers, academic artists and other scholars that have entered the worlds of graffiti writers to explain their origins, trajectories, motivations, their identity construction, their conception of the self and their role and relation with society at large. However, still there is no synthetic effort of categorisation that provides understandable and communicable approaches to graffiti in the real world. From some sectors graffiti is still something to “deal with”. Generally speaking, authorities and dutyholders consider graffiti as threat a security and safety issue, turning it into something that needs to be addressed. For social workers, for instance, graffiti can be a means of communication with certain youth sectors or even a tool for social cohesion generation. Departing from this perspective, Graffolution was designed: an EC funded project for generating awareness and advance in the provision of best practices for tackling graffiti in Austria, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. The first rule encountered is no-one-size-fits-all and referring to graffiti and graffiti writers, this requires a complex understanding of the phenomenon, their trajectories as well as individual and collective dispositions. The aim of this paper is to provide a consistent typology of graffiti writers, offering a comprehensive picture of whose are the hands behind the graffiti cans. This serves a double level purpose: advancing at the theoretical level putting forward the sociocultural approaches to careers and social backgrounds provided by ethnographic approaches, as well as capturing the complexity of the phenomenon to serve as an operative conceptual basis for practitioners, professionals and decision makers. In doing so, the analysis is made on the transcripts obtained for 22 semi-structured interviews, carried out in the four participating countries. The transcripts have been analysed according to the “persona” methodology, which constitutes a systematic and novel approach and a qualitative technique for clustering information. As a result, three main categories have been defined according to important ambitions, challenges and stages of typical ‘journeys’ or ‘pathways’ of actors. These findings contribute to form a basis of a) highlight the misconceptions around graffiti as a petty crime, and b) offer a guide to understand graffiti writers under a socio-cultural perspective.

Recently there has been a resurgence of murals in several European and American cities. Street art visual practices have privileged murals as one of the most suitable formats to address public spaces. Despite the increasing recognition and significance of murals for the visual culture of these cities, this contemporary urban art practice has not received much attention from recent literature. This paper provides a literature review on contemporary murals, giving an account of their popularity, their relation to location-specificity and global presence, as well as the means of dissemination of such art expression. The study will then focus on a set of case studies in Lisbon, regarding the paradigmatic shift from sculpture commissioning to mural commissioning within Portuguese Brazilian cultural relationships. The works of OSGEMEOS, Bicicleta sem Freio and Nunca will be discussed in this framework, questioning what the contributions of contemporary mural works might be for the public spaces of the city.

This article sets out to show how a sociological research project on the production of street art in Lisbon was built, from the construction of an object of research to the development of a methodological approach that enabled the collection of a diverse set of expressive data. The notion of 'route' serves not only as a valuable instrument of research in the first stages of an investigation in urban sociology, but also as a powerful visual depiction of the development of a specific methodology and the set of techniques adopted. The diverse set of interrogations about the object that stem from these incursions, as well as the specific urban context at hand, allowed the researcher to conceptualize street art as a component of contemporary urban space and as a visual means to reveal social dynamics between the several actors involved in its production, and the city itself. Therefore, in this paper it is briefly shown how this object is theoretically framed, namely in what concerns the street artists and the way they build an artistic path and attribute meaning to the act of intervening artistically in the streets of the city, and how this connects with the worlds of contemporary art and the several contexts of production of street art; the contexts in which street art is currently created in Lisbon, from individual initiatives to the actions of associations or collectives, and the municipality; and the way in which the city, through its institutional powers, can instrumentalize street art as a way of creating 'images of the city', and how this can be explored in terms of tourism and the marketing of cities, and the conflict or opportunities that these processes reveal for the actors involved.

Der vormalige Young British Artist Damien Hirst und der Street Artist Banksy sind zwei der bekanntesten Vertreter der britischen Gegenwartskunst - ihre Werke im Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Konsum und Popkultur gehören zu den meistbeachtetsten unserer Zeit. Eine systematische Aufarbeitung dieser künstlerischen Positionen und ihrer Bezüge zur Konsumkultur unserer Gegenwart hat jedoch lange auf sich warten lassen. Ulrich Blanché schließt diese Lücke: Er untersucht die Werke der Künstler vor dem Hintergrund der Londoner Kunstszene seit 1980, zeigt Verbindungen zu Duchamp, Warhol oder auch Koons auf und reflektiert die Rolle des Rezipienten, die Bedeutung der »Location« und insbesondere die Bezüge zwischen Kunst, Konsum und Werbung in diesen Werken.

Los estudios sobre performance han proliferado de manera excepcional a lo largo de las últimas décadas alentados por el “giro corporal” de las ciencias sociales. A las investigaciones antropológicas y sociológicas se le suma la llamada de atención que desde la teoría del arte se desarrolla a razón de las correspondencias y antagonismos de la acción creativa en los espacios públicos. En esta estela discursiva se imbrican experiencias que se soportan a través de lo corporal, resignificándolo y operando como un nuevo modo de autorreconomiento individual y colectivo. Este artículo trata de proponer una mirada reflexiva hacia el espectro de éstos estudios a través de las experiencias que el artista Nel Amaro ha desarrollado a fin de visibilizar y señalizar cómo las prácticas estéticas intervienen en lo común, en los modos de hacer y habitar.

La polémica que reviste actualmente al tema del graffiti incide en no percibir con plenitud y detalle la complejidad social y cultural que contiene. Su consideración como un subproducto y una tara urbana no ha impedido que se hable sobre él, pero con frecuencia ha influido en que se plantee de un modo inadecuado. Incluso, los intentos por reconsiderar su valía cultural incurren también en generar una imagen excesivamente romántica y situar el debate entre la falacia del graffiti como arte o como vandalismo. No obstante, primero conviene, para comprender lo que representa, observar su dinámica histórica y su estrecha relación con la evolución de la ciudad como ente social.

Der vormalige Young British Artist Damien Hirst und der Street Artist Banksy sind zwei der bekanntesten Vertreter der britischen Gegenwartskunst - ihre Werke im Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Konsum und Popkultur gehören zu den meistbeachtetsten unserer Zeit. Eine systematische Aufarbeitung dieser künstlerischen Positionen und ihrer Bezüge zur Konsumkultur unserer Gegenwart hat jedoch lange auf sich warten lassen. Ulrich Blanché schließt diese Lücke: Er untersucht die Werke der Künstler vor dem Hintergrund der Londoner Kunstszene seit 1980, zeigt Verbindungen zu Duchamp, Warhol oder auch Koons auf und reflektiert die Rolle des Rezipienten, die Bedeutung der »Location« und insbesondere die Bezüge zwischen Kunst, Konsum und Werbung in diesen Werken.

Konsumkunst. Kultur und Kommerz bei Banksy und Damien Hirst (2012)

After centuries of symbolic and political oppression, Galicia has been recognized by the Spanish constitution as a historic nationality. However, despite a certain degree of political autonomy, Galician identity is threatened by increasing homogenization in the economic, social, cultural and linguistic fields. In the early 1990s the aesthetic movement Bravú constructed an aesthetic community, sustained by an ideological project, and with the aim to, on the one hand, prevent Galician culture from becoming folklore stuck in a time warp and, on the other hand, to validate Galician identity. The Bravú artists refused the historically inherited outsider position and contributed to a reinvention of Galician identity and of a political ideal within a cosmopolitan, internationalist framework and by reversing social stigmas through their works and performances.

The concept of ‘resistance' has turned into a critical tool in different areas of political, philosophical and sociological thought. At the same time, the notion seems to be as productive as it is diffuse. ‘Resistance' is used in very specific contexts in scientific or technical disciplines, and with extreme flexibility in social and cultural studies. In the latter two areas, the concept is often used without prior reflection on its characteristics and limitations. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze provides a possible framework for conceiving cultural and political practices of resistance as positions of force, when he defines contraction as ‘a contemplation that preserves the preceding in the following'. The purpose of this article is to understand political ecologism in its activist and poetical dimensions, in light of a Deleuzian interpretation of resistance.

O artigo que aqui se inicia parte de uma reflexão mais genérica sobre a imagem e a visualidade na cidade, para se centrar num exemplo que considero particularmente interessante para o estudo das dinâmicas contemporâneas de apropriação do espaço urbano que recorrem a dispositivos de natureza visual. A cidade é, neste contexto, tomada como artefacto cultural, uma fabricação histórica participada por agentes com poderes e desejos desiguais. Nesta arena conflitual habitam pessoas e comunidades com condições, vontades, práticas e representações, dissemelhantes. A cidade espelha esta multiplicidade ontológica com propensão a revelar-se na matéria visível do quotidiano. À tona emergem sinais, social e culturalmente significativos, que contribuem para a fundação de um ecossistema simbólico e comunicativo particular. Podemos, eventualmente, encarar a existência de uma cultura visual urbana (Wells, 2007) dada a especificidade de agentes, gramáticas e mecanismos de comunicação que conseguimos antever neste território.

The different neighborhoods of a city present each a complex of negative and positive traits that both influence and become influenced by marginal cultural activity. Specifically, graffiti, urban writing and drawing or the activity in public places of graffiti writers, street artists or cultural activists, social and political, contribute to constructing and defining the public image of any city area, underscoring or changing the traditional representation of these social spaces. The author discusses two cases in Madrid at the turn of the 20th century: those of the neighborhoods of Vallecas and Malasaña.

O obxectivo deste traballo é vincular a representación de Santiago de Compostela cos procesos de construción da identidade galega contemporánea, privilexiando as diferentes figuracións da cidade no ámbito da poesía. Además de analizar o papel da cidade en distintos poemarios, antoloxías, libros coletivos e coleccións, o artigo detense nas implicacións socioliterarias d inclusións dos textos e fragmentos poéticos en soportes como a tarxeta postal, os catálogos ou as guías de viaxe. En suma, este percorrido pola historia da literatura galega da segunda metade do século XX á luz das figuracións urbanas pretende poñer de relevo a importancia de Santiago como escenario e motor de modelos identitarios diferenciais, cando no abertamente contrapostos.

El Graffiti Movement alcanza Europa en los años 80 e irrumpe en Madrid a mediados de esta década, renovando el discurso mural tradicional. Dadas las peculiaridades sociales y urbanísticas de sus barrios, se implanta en Vallecas temprana y prolíficamente. Así, Vallecas se erige como un excelente exponente para descubrir el particular proceso de introducción y enraizamiento de esta modalidad de graffiti, sus calves conceptuales, organizativas y operativas, su evolución técnica, formal e iconográfica, las características sociológicas, espaciales y linguísticas que envuelven su desarrollo y los factores exógenos y endógenos que modelan esta muestra espontánea de la creación gráfica y la manifestación artística populares, al margen del arte institucional. Como base de este estudio, no obstante, se emprende la tarea de encuadrar el Graffiti Movement vallecano tanto dentro de la propia historia del movimiento, como de una cartografía del graffiti como medio de comunicación no oficial, pero tradicional, y de las grandes corrientes contemporáneas, tanto grafiteras antiestéticas sociales o estético-musicales.