Project at AIAS

This project analyzes art’s changing role in the larger socio-economic context of the neoliberal urbanism  to understand how art takes part in urban regeneration projects, but also the ways in which it captures and, in some instances, subverts the experience of the gentrified urban space, reveals the hegemonic and counterhegemonic interactions among different actors of the urban space and empowers the communities in the gentrified neighborhoods. The aim of the project is twofold, namely:(1) to rethink the changing and dialectical roles of the art and artists in an urbanism that put the interests of capital over the interests of ordinary inhabitants, (2) to reveal the potential of aesthetics in the critically reflecting formation of agonistic experience that constitutes democratic political culture in the urban space. It elaborates a critical and intersectional methodological framework that examines ‘the right to the city’ while setting up a theoretical and visual analysis of the aesthetic formations that are positive resources for political culture to be visible and to channel subjective dynamics into political participation and empowerment.