Cities are as diverse as the layers that compose them. An ongoing alchemy sets on producing sometimes conflicting, yet osmotic inhabitance patterns, sensorial experience and social togetherness. Also the result of many architectural dreams, evolving power structures and ` contingent local deviations, cities are simultaneously hardware concrete structures and ephemeral realms. In them, we live & die, we meet & depart, we hold together the daily fiction that glues the interstices of the bigger picture of the urban phenomena.
A City Lab is a temporary zone of attention for mapping-and-performing-procedures that is installed in critical neighborhoods or urban areas, chosen by its attachment to a local contingent urge or an incipient or persistent sociopolitical issue. Traveling through different cities in South America, Europe and Asia with the nomadic and time-based relational structure of the City Labs, artists Fernanda Eugenio & Gustavo Ciríaco seek to research the singular arrangements and the in situ performativeness of the materiality emerging from the co-operations between geography & architecture, politics & affects, habits & inhabitation, codes & deviations, coexistence & togetherness, visibility & invisibility.
With the collaboration of local artists under a residence and/or workshop frame, the proposal is to collectively produce sensible, sensorial and experiential maps of an urban environment, using two basic (yet almost endless foldable) tactics: displacement/walking & placement/remaining.
Departing from these maps and the direct experience of the site, they explore different modes of artistic use of daily life materiality for the construction of site-specific propositions. These propositions organize themselves as built-up situations: simple formulations for the creation of an event taking as basis what is already there.
