The Somatic Urban Landscape. Co-mapping bodies and urban places through relational contextual arts.

Abstract

From 2016 to 2021, the researcher lived in Mouraria (Lisbon) and Raval (Barcelona), working with communities and residents and collaborating with socio-cultural and artistic associations, local governments and public institutions. Through a participatory community artistic-based research methodology and the implementation of relational and contextual art laboratories in both neighbourhoods, we observed how multicultural communities build a sense of belonging to their urban places through artistic and performative activities. Our objective was to study the qualitative embodied aspects of place identity construction in a multicultural urban context under processes of social mobility (migrations, city tourism, and gentrification). In our central hypothesis, we considered the production of space and intangible heritage as a cultural construction based on individual and collective embodied experiences and performative place-making practices. In our methodological work, we enquired about this double “body-world” articulation, using the “body” as a medium for communication, language expression, artistic representation and mapping. Hence, we explored creative artistic processes connecting urban places with embodied experiences and representation tools, co-mapping sites onto bodies and bodies onto sites. This research allowed us to collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of artists in plastic arts, illustration, sound design, performance, site-dance, and physical theatre. As a result, we stimulated multicultural social encounters and intergenerational dialogues about and related to the construction of an intangible urban heritage and cultural identity expressions related to the sense of attachment of communities to their urban landscapes.