Cities are as diverse as the layers that compose them. An ongoing alchemy sets on producing sometimes conflicting, yet osmotic inhabitance patterns, sensorial experience and social togetherness. Also the result of many architectural dreams, evolving power structures and contingent local deviations, cities are simultaneously hardware concrete structures and ephemeral realms. In them, we live & die, we meet & depart, we hold together the daily fiction that glues the interstices of the bigger picture of the urban phenomena.
City Lab is a temporary zone of attention for mapping-and-performing-procedures that is installed in critical neighborhoods or urban areas, chosen for its attachment to a local contingent urge or an incipient or persistent sociopolitical question. Traveling through different cities in South America, Europe and Asia with the nomadic and temporary structure of the City Labs, artists Fernanda Eugenio & Gustavo Ciríaco seek to research the singular arrangements and the in situ performativeness of the materiality emergent from the co-operations between geography & architecture, habits & inhabitation, codes & deviations, coexistence & togetherness, ordinary & extraordinary, visibility & invisibility.
Under the frame of a workshop called Site-specific Practices: performing the space, they invite local artists to participate collaboratively in the construction of site-specific propositions involving diverse art forms. Mixing together ethnographic tools for description-and-circumscription and positional-based mapping approaches coming from contextual art, the collaborative and/or solo propositions assume the form of a simple enunciation, a sentence-task that synthesizes WHAT-HOW-WHERE-WHEN is going to be done, seeking to construct the conditions for something to happen – or, for something to be (or not) performed by/with the city.
For more info, access the website on the project HERE.
