Urban Negotiations And Art Tactics

Abstract

Urban Negotiations and Art Tactics are art strategies that find possibilities for art to engage in real life issues. Nomadic Kitchen is an interstitial transversal artwork that occupies a place between art and urban space. This work engages with issues of self-organization, in the process negotiating the urban environment with the residents of Vila Nova, a favela community in Sao Miguel Brazil. Vila Nova is in a process of regeneration but this does not sanitize the conflict of local conditions, it is within the contradictions of conflict that new ideas emerge for models for urbanity. Nomadic Kitchen is one urban practice among many in a collaborative and participatory action in the production of public and private space. The artwork operates as bricolage within and across the transversal field of operation that includes institution and post-institutional art practice. The emergent strategies for this artwork evolved through a series of workshops with residents of Vila Nova. The field of production creates a place of selforganisation between participants. The project embraces ‘informality’ as another kind of intelligence whose tactics bring a collective visibility to the project and other kinds of urban negotiations. The structure functions as a locus where residents self govern and develop flexible and creative ways of building a context for living. The transversal field of Nomadic Kitchen invests in a desiring production that is flexible, fluid, nomadic and adaptable to different occasions and contexts of informal urban practices. Urban decisions around producing public and social space are made while cooking eating and meeting in the Nomadic Kitchen. This interstitial sculptural structure becomes a place of dialogue while defining the circumstances that determine its situated conditions and public space. The consequences of Nomadic Kitchen explore the potential limits of art production as an urgent action in creating an aesthetic-ethical-spatialpolitics. URBAN NEGOTIATIONS AND ART TACTICS