An artist in public square

Abstract

At the intersection between the City, the Urban and the Human, between artistic and scientific knowledge, this text is placed, proposing the superposition of distinct forces acting on a given public space. The most emblematic place is the Plaza de la Constitución (or el Zócalo, as it is popularly known): the largest and oldest square in the center of Mexico City. This urban space gains new layers and dynamics through the poetic actions of the Belgian-Mexican artist, Francis Alÿs, who develops part of his work there. The article presents four of these actions, carried out between 1994 and 1999, and discusses its capacity for tensioning the temporalities at stake in the created situations and for provoking critical and political thinking about the sociabilities and urban identities that agitate there. Alÿs's set of artistic interventions will be debated through Lefebvre's theoretical legacy and the notion of the right to the city; de Rancière's and the relationship between aesthetics and politics; de Deleuze and Guattari's regarding agenciamentos e territorializations. The authors will help to structure an analysis matrix and thus launch possible readings about the contributions of the artist and his actions to the public space, working from the contemporary to talk about the many times that make up the now.