Arte/Cidade proposes a new modality of urban intervention:
to start from an entire region, including the urban restructuring processes, architectural
elements, existing occupation forms and the foreseen or in progress operations.
An intensive urban cartography that evidences the area complexity and dynamics,
disclosing zones of action and articulation intervals: an indeterminate and fluid
territory.
To explore the multiple possible combinations, producing continuous compositions. Each intervention is enrolled in this system and makes possible new articulations. Each intervention becomes another vector introduced in this field each time more thickly and dynamic.
Interventions in megacities place the question of the perception of large urban areas. These various and simultaneous actions could provide another perception of the urban area? Another mapping (directions, rearticulations) will appear from there? Which are the questions concerning the apprehension, by the public, of interventions in this scale? Which problems a so vast and distructured area places for the perception of its patterns and the interventions carried through there? How the population will be able to access the interventions and all the area that they are delimiting?
The imposing paradigms are, necessarily, larger and complex, escaping to the established experience and perception parameters, of conventional architecture and urbanism, of the art for public spaces known grammar. The proposed situations require approaches that cannot appeal to the procedures traditionally established by sculpture and recent artistic practices for site-specific and installations. The reference to larger urban scales is indispensable.
When the cities are adopting monumentalization strategies, turned to marketing, real estate promotion and tourism, Arte/Cidade tries to prevent the inherent spectacularization to these processes. The interventions dimensions are not determined by the consideration of an isolated object, demarcating a position or event. It does not have landmark function, feature of the traditional sculpture.
They aim at, in contrast, to introduce new possibilities of perception of the situations, through the relations with the different involved scales and the diverse implied urbanistic and social processes, the successive space restructuration and the distinct forms of occupation. Each intervention takes in consideration multiple relations between different urban scales, several social and politic implications and multiple possibilities of apprehension and reading, from local visitation to media information.
