Ex_posiciones

Resumen

This lecture consists of a theoretical reflection titled“Let’s start to walk” in which I deal with some genericissues around the notion of urban drift, work with thebody, memory and places. I will use as a map of this shortjourney some reflections by Maaschelein and Agambenon the idea of studying, travel, attention and the importance of experience to be able to “see” the path. I will citeWalter Benjamin’s “Walking on foot” in Unique Directionalong with Blanchot, Weil, Sontag, Hugh of Saint Victor,etc. I will try to articulate these ideas with some strategiesused by visual artists like the situationist “détournement”,Richard Long’s “act of walking as a principle”, RobertSmithson’s estrangement of place, Sophie Calle’s use ofthe route itself as a fictional story or the problematic reconstruction of identity proposed by Cindy Sherman. On a second part I present an artistic project that I havebeen working on for the past six years: “The Waste City/La ciudad baldía”, done within an artistic discipline. Theproject consists of six performances in spaces, places,and urban containers that generate a series of audiovisualpieces. Videos document the atmosphere of the tours andtheir circular nature, in which Butoh dancers are filmednaked, their bodies painted white while they roam thestreets and monumental architecture of the city. I will finish by quoting in passing some authors from other literarymedia like Yasunari Kawabata, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and James Joyce as examples ofthe network that is established between places, events andmemory.