Table Of ContentVisual Participatory Arts Based Research
in the City
Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City maps ontological, aesthetic
and ethic differences between humanist and posthumanist arts-based research
while providing insight into methodological orientations to develop arts-based
research with frameworks based on process philosophies.
It is the first book on arts-based research which focuses on the city, adopting
a posthumanist approach to the assembled nature of urban environments, where
agency is distributed across infrastructures, technologies, spaces, things and bod-
ies. Chapters 2 to 8 feature a series of studies, situated in different cities in Europe
and the Americas, which outline experiences of movement, inhabitancy, inter-
dependence, collaboration, infrastructuring and sensorial recalibration informed
by art practices in film, photography, digital projection, installation, performance
and art as social practice. At the core of this book is the idea that aesthetic
ecologies of cities do not depend solely on human activity, relying instead on
non-logocentric modalities of collective life.
The book is an indispensable tool to researchers, instructors and graduate stu-
dents in education, the social sciences and the arts aiming to conceive, design
and develop projects in arts-based research.
Laura Trafí-Prats is a Senior Lecturer of Childhood Studies and Research Meth-
odologies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Laura’s research engages with
and responds to children and young people’s sensory and material experiences
in a variety of contexts including urban spaces, the natural environment and
schooling.
Aurelio Castro-Varela is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Pedagogies at the
University of Barcelona. His research focuses on learning environments and
urban arts-based practices through a new materialist perspective. He is also a
member of the research group Esbrina and postdoctoral researcher in the Euro-
pean project Pleasurescapes. Port Cities’ Transnational Forces of Integration.
Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City
Mega-Events, City and Power
Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira
Mega-City Region Development in China
Edited by Anthony G.O. Yeh, George C.S. Lin and Fiona F. Yang
Eco and Low-Carbon New Towns in China
Sustainability Transformation in the Making
Yang Fu and Xiaoling Zhang
Overlooked Cities
Power, Politics and Knowledge Beyond the Urban South
Edited by Hanna A Ruszczyk, Erwin Nugraha and Isolde de Villiers
The Walkable City
Jennie Middleton
Cities Without Capitalism
Edited By Hossein Sadri and Senem Zeybekoglu
Public Participation Process in Urban Planning
Evaluation Approaches of Fairness and Effectiveness Criteria of Planning Advi-
sory Committees
By Kamal Uddin and Bhuiyan Monwar Alam
Hegemony, Security Infrastructures and the Politics of Crime
Everyday Experiences in South Africa
Gideon van Riet
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Studies-in-Urbanism-and-the-City/book-series/RSUC
Visual Participatory Arts Based
Research in the City
Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics
Edited by Laura Trafí-Prats
and Aurelio Castro-Varela
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Laura Trafí-Prats and Aurelio
Castro-Varela; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Laura Trafí-Prats and Aurelio Castro-Varela to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-46296-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-22109-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02796-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027966
Typeset in Goudy Oldstyle
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xii
1 Visual participatory arts-based research in the city: Outlining
posthumanist approaches 1
LAURA TRAFÍ-PRATS AND AURELIO CASTRO-VARELA
PART I
Ontological Reorientations 21
2 Relocating the cinema in the city: The case of El Solar de la Puri 23
AURELIO CASTRO-VARELA
3 Fred Herzog’s affective engagements with things in the city of
Vancouver 40
DONAL O’DONOGHUE AND MATTHEW ISHERWOOD
4 Black life and aesthetic sociality in the Subúrbio Ferroviário de
Salvador, Bahia 53
BRAIS ESTÉVEZ
PART II
Aesthetic Practices 71
5 Lively pathways: finding the aesthetic in everyday practice 73
VALERIE TRIGGS, MICHELE SORENSEN AND RITA L. IRWIN
vi Contents
6 A hauntological enlivening of the Coma Cros archive through
pedagogical inquiry and live performance 89
JUDIT VIDIELLA
PART III
Ethics of Participation 105
7 The Lynden sculpture garden’s call and response program: to
wonder, encounter and emplace through the radical
Black imagination 107
RINA LITTLE AND PORTIA COBB
8 A poetics of opacity: towards a new ethics of participation in
gallery-based art projects with young people 126
ELIZABETH DE FREITAS, LAURA TRAFI-PRATS, DAVID ROUSELL
AND RIIKKA HOHTI
Epilogue
The remaking of collective life in (post)pandemic times 143
LAURA TRAFI-PRATS AND AURELIO CASTRO-VARELA
Index 152
Figures
2.1 Puríssima Concepció Street in 2011. Photo by Cristina Silva. 28
2.2 The empty fenced-off plot in 2014. Photo by Taller de Ficció. 28
2.3 The white screen and the red “cinema” sign in the fall of 2014.
Photo by Óscar Guillén. 29
2.4 The poster that announced the first film session at El Solar del
Puri on 5 July 2014. Design by Cristina Silva. 33
2.5 El Solar de la Puri in the evening before the start of a filmic
session, in May 2015. Photo by Taller de Ficció 36
2.6 The transfilmic envelopment of SP during a screening in 2017.
Photo by Laboratorio Reversible. 36
4.1 Two perspectives of São João do Cabrito from House 2. Photos by
the author. 59
4.2 Main room in House 1. Photo by the author. 61
4.3 Improvised samba at the closing time of Ocupa Lajes exhibition
held in Itapuã neighbourhood. Photo by the author. 63
4.4 Handmade sign made by local artist Perinho Santana at the door
in House 1. Photo by the author. 64
4.5 A virgin and child print by artist Cláudio Pastro in front of two
sacred and profane altars. Photo by the author. 65
5.1 Untitled by Rachel Morgan (2018). 82
5.2 Five Days in September by Ken Morimoto (2018). 83
5.3 Untitled by Marzieh Mosavarzadeh (2018). 84
5.4 Untitled by Kyla Crawford (2019). 85
6.1 On the left, Coma Cros workers leaving the factory (1910, Joan
Vivó Holding). Image courtesy of Salt Municipal Archive (CAT.
AMS.613.80). On the right, an image of the banner covering the
Coma Cros building (2019) that contained the same historical
image and a quote from Hardt and Negri’s book Empire. Images by
the author. 90
6.2 Photomontage courtesy of Jaume Prat. 92
6.3 Paula Delito’s performance Who Was Amalia Alegre? Images by the
author. 96
6.4 The class in the street (above) and an image of the performance
Metallic Soul (below). Photos by the author. 97
viii Figures
6.5 Image of the performance Periods. Courtesy of Assumpta Bassas. 100
7.1 Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities (2016). Image courtesy of Jim
Wildeman. 114
7.2 Portia Cobb in “Lizzie’s Garden”. Image courtesy of Maeve Jackson. 118
7.3 Scott Barton with guests at harvest table dinner in 2018. Image
courtesy of Lynden Sculpture Garden. 118
7.4 Arianne King Comer leads a workshop in 2018. Image courtesy of
Sara Risley. 119
7.5 Community participants at Arianne King Comer’s workshop.
Image courtesy of Sara Risley. 120
7.6 A performance connected to Rooted: The Storied Land, Memory,
and Belonging at Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities in 2018. The
Jazzy Jewels, a troupe of elders, who perform a line dance, join
Portia Cobb who brings Lizzie to life. Dresses are designed by
Arianne King Comer. Image courtesy of Sara Risley. 120
8.1 Stills from the video recorded in the gallery as the young man
danced over Dada Masilo’s dancing. 131
8.2 General view of the Remixing Thick Time Exhibition. From
foreground to background, we can see the installations: A game
of Conceptual Activations, Fugitive Whispers and The Missing Half
Second. 134
8.3 The Missing Half Second. Animated video. Still images #40–45
layered (above) and still images # 66–71 layered (below). 135
8.4 A young person listening for his voice in the Fugitive Whispers
installation. 137
Contributors
Portia Cobb is an interdisciplinary artist—a maker of short, single-channel,
poetic documentary, auto-ethnographic video and photographic essay. She
is also an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Her practice includes site-specific collaborative performance as a gesture of
expanding the cinematic experience beyond the frame. Her themes are mem-
ory and forced forgetting, the politics of place and identity, home and disloca-
tion, and rural and urban spaces.
Brais Estévez is an urban geographer who currently works as an independent
researcher. He has done research in Barcelona, where he studied on urban
controversies and the politics of public spaces. Between 2017 and the end
of 2019 he worked in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil), as a postdoc researcher in the
Geography department of Universidade Federal da Bahia. It was in Bahia
where his ethnographic work, traditionally focused on grassroots urbanism,
met with Black urbanism.
Elizabeth de Freitas is a Professor at Adelphi University. Her research explores
innovative data methodologies in the social sciences, anthropological and
philosophical investigations of digital life, and cultural-material studies of
mathematical practices in complex learning environments. Her work has
been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council,
the US National Science Foundation, and the UK Economic and Social
Research Council.
Riikka Hohti (PhD, MA, music) works at the Faculty of Education and the
Institute for Sustainable Sciences, University of Helsinki. Riikka has con-
ducted multispecies ethnographic research in educational contexts and writ-
ten about multispecies childhoods, care relations, digitality, temporality and
the affective atmospheres of the Anthropocene. Her current postdoctoral
project develops the concept of more-than-human education, with a specific
focus on care relations between children and animals.
Rita L. Irwin is a Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Art
Education at The University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research
interests have spanned in-service art education, teacher education, socio-cultural
issues, curriculum practices across K-12 and informal learning settings, and
