Reconfiguring the city

art and occupation at the Hotel Cambridge in São Paulo

Abstract

In this article, I present how contemporary art practitioners engage with epistemic disobedience and the concept of occupation in order to propose a reconfiguration of the city. First, I argue that there is ever more reflection on the resignification of urban space brought about by a particular type of interstitial practice of contemporary art; and second, that the contexts in which these practices occur mean that artists working with such paradigms encounter, and respond to, an entirely different notion of ‘participation’ than that articulated by Claire Bishop (2004, 2012) or Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Central to what characterizes and forms this artistic practice is its location: situated on the porous border between institutional and non-institutional spaces of contemporary art, and often embedded in complex struggles regarding the right to the city, such processes occur within networks and hierarchies, deriving of multiple modes of life. And it is this crossing of axes – the horizontal and the vertical, the ephemeral and the utopian – that gives such reconfiguration its unique potential, while also putting forward a theorisation of the widely observed imminence of art.