Cutting the city with your feet: on landscape crossings brazilian

Abstract

In the present text, we discuss the act of walking as a beginning and an end, that can be configured as a performative action that closes in itself. The notion of crossing will be presented as opposed to the one of drift. We will analyze of two crossings: one in São Paulo and another in Uberlândia, realized by groups of artists related to a common research. The crossing of a territory promotes the dissolution of the boundaries between art and reality, between visible and invisible, between seeing and doing, reconfiguring the function of the artist and the way of using art. It creates a poetics in which art and politics are inseparable. It is an action that aims to (re)cut territories in different axes, (re)signifying their uses and instituting a kind of event in the city. Generally, such action results in other materialities (reports, photos, videos and drawings) that present themselves to absent spectators, such as traces or vestiges of this intervention in the urban fabric. In our reflection, it is important to perceive crossings as ways of subverting, reversing perspectives of occupation of the city, emphasizing as potency and role of the artist the invention of other senses for habits and worlds already constituted.