ANTI-PROJECT
Due to inquiries made in the pre-banking department, I realized that my proposal is not a “project”, but a kind of “anti-project” – the prefix “anti” has Greek origin and means “on the opposite side” being used in Portuguese to express the idea of opposition, of annoyance – since the basis for the development of my Completion of Course Work (TCC) is precisely opposed to what we understand as the stages and planning of a project, especially within the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. During all academic periods, I was directed to do, and to think, according to the project methodology, following the rules and schedules of each studio. Now, as far as possible, my intention was to do my TCC according to my rules and what is consistent with me.
My thinking does not start, and does not develop, along a typically academic chronological and methodological line in which there is a beginning, middle and a well-resolved end. My work ends in the middle - it was and will still be resolutions and dissolutions, without the pretense of an absolute end. This is also reflected in the way I try to present content to site visitors: in a way that they can build their own connections, do their own abductions and, if they feel comfortable, contribute too.
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I recently read part of the book Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science , by the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, which perfectly corroborates my idea of what an “anti-project” would be. It is a claim, in the case of Stengers, it claims for a “slow down” of science, a necessary condition to think with abstractions instead of obeying the current “fast” science, which imposes certain operating systems and represses the imagination. This recovery of scientific research, for her, means reinserting the sciences in a confused world that escapes pre-established general categories and in which each scientist must invent their own means.
Isabelle Stengers says: “I would therefore argue that if we academics wish to claim our practices as worthy, we also need to become claiming activists in our own way, inventing our own ways of responding to the barbarism that gains ground every time we bow down. in the face of necessity, including the need to accept the rules of the game or to be excluded from it.”
Since this is not a project, nor a typically theoretical and academic text, I wanted to start by talking about myself. I spent a few days reflecting on a question that seems to me to be one of the main ones in this work: how did I arrive at dissent? Today I say that, for sure, it was by consensus. I mean, art and urbanism – my main interests in college – for years meant for me, even if forged from something else, to aim for consensus. In short, an idea of democratic spaces that work to appease conflicts and lead to an idealization of harmonious coexistence between individuals and the city. However, in the final years of my graduation, what I saw most was a hypocritical democracy, increasingly glaring and murderous conflicts and a pandemic situation which led to many deaths and to reprogram our lives, learning other ways of working, socializing and relationship with the world. As much as within the comfort zone that my privileges allow me, what less flourished within me was this “harmony”, corroborating the emergence of this “anti-project”.
How to talk about art and urbanism that lead to a romantic and illusory consensus of the city if I, and if our country, were (or are) increasingly angry and boiling? My family tends to think I'm the "revolted" and "disputing" one. So, again, how could my TCC lead me to consensus? I don't know if I was taken by him or if I took him, but in the end, from consensus, we arrived together at dissent. As my advisor Otavio Leonidio said in his text “Reclaim the City without Form”: the city without form can only be reached through the city as form.
I wanted to make it clear that dissent does not just promote revolt or a conflict seen as “bad”. Dissent in the public space, physical or virtual, is both the theater of conflicts that reveals what is repressed to sustain a false harmony, and the place for the possibility of solutions that arise from this disclosure. It has a potential that consensus, in my view, is limiting.
Based on this principle of dissent, the first intention of my “anti-project” was to create a website to expose, in a synthetic way, my research axes to be explored by anyone interested in the subjects, in a non-conducted way. This part could already be done using the Wix platform.
My second intention was that this public space of the site could somehow materialize my research and become an articulation of the physical public space, in which its potentialities could be explored. Therefore, my final goal in this limiting term of the TCC was to develop the proposal of a practice of claim that would take place in the virtual space where the city, without form, began to appear and, thus, the political sharing of the sensible.
As Jacques Rancière says in his book “The sharing of the sensible”:
“Politics and art, as well as knowledge, build 'fictions', that is, material rearrangements of signs and images, of the relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done. do. (...) They design, therefore, random communities that contribute to the formation of collectives of enunciation that call into question the distribution of roles, territories and languages – in short, of those political subjects that call into question the already given sharing of the sensitive."
I then propose that this vindicating practice be done through a counter-cartography and that, based on Rancière's idea of sharing the sensitive, it can provide individuals with a process of disidentification, in which each one would leave their places already directed by the system - which tells us where we should go and how we should act in these spaces – to question what kinds of relationships are being produced, for whom and why. Providing these disidentifications is fundamental, because as well as social demonstrations and mobilizations – we have as an example the Brazilian documentary “Espero tua (re)volta” – it allows countercartography to become a place of confrontation, denunciation, claim and, from assemblages of collectives of enunciation, of spatialization of actions that reconfigure the world and the utopias of the future.
The countercartographic practice, in addition to being a tool for claiming, is also a game of powers and political decisions – as seen in Fahlström’s Monopoly and in QMary mapping by the Counter-Cartographies Collective, present in the “countercartography” axis. Therefore, in addition to a speculative metaphor of the world, the idea is that, based on a game that involves space policies, the city's claim would be accompanied by new dissent and socio-spatial rules that actually had an influence on urban space.
Rosalyn Deutsche argues that the public sphere remains democratic only to the extent that its naturalized exclusions are taken into account and open to challenge. A democratic society is one in which conflicting relationships are maintained, not erased - it is this virtual public space that I want to provide.
But then, what kinds of spatial assemblages would this counter-cartography virtualize? Or rather, how can the map manage relationships and experimental propositions about the physical city? What other city redesigns? What other paths, positions and dialogues expose the existing tensions? How to make this virtual space provide support for the conflict, which brings to light the antagonisms hidden by the appeasement of physical urban spaces?