Cultura (audio)visual y espacios públicos(re)inventando la Ciudad

Abstract

Built, inhabited, imagined and recreated, the city is a constant source of inspiration and reflection. Shaped by politicians, architects and urban planners, the city stands as the repository of public will and the setting for the symbols of official history. In the same way, as a lived space, the city constitutes an artistic medium of the first order, lending itself to an approach rooted in the subjectivity of experience, an experience that is also that of the artist who dreams and (re)invents urban landscape. The need to reflect on this physical reference constructed from different positions and lines of thought becomes evident by conceiving the city as an essential framework for transforming the space in which human beings develop. In this sense, the book (Audio)Visual Culture and Public Spaces: (Re)Inventing the City contributes to this reflection and analysis by proposing, from a transdisciplinary perspective, an approach to the public spaces of the city based on visual and audio-visual culture. The present work will propose a double perspective when exploring the city. So, it is presented in two distinct sections: “(Audio)visual Representations of The City” and “Artistic Interventions in The Public Space”. Throughout the first section, the cities studied will be conceived in their relationship with the discourses and images that traverse them, from the plastic arts, film, photography and comics. All of these projections can, in turn, transform the city. The second section will focus on the intervention of urban space, which, by mobilizing vacant or interstitial spaces, resemanticises the city, to the point of competing with conventional art exhibition spaces.