Walking with Cities: to become a stranger, to converse and to live with

Abstract

This study sheds light to concerns that emerged, initially, from a proposition of walking as a way of learning to converse and to live with strangers. As these wanderings intensified, other questions were brought up through the triad of becoming a stranger, conversing and living with, as ways to investigate and intervene that consider walking as an aesthetic practice, a production of spaces (Careri, 2013; 2017) of incendiary pathways (Couto, 2009), and as a dispositif of (trans)formative processes enacted by artists, investigators and educators of the Arts and Urban Micropolitics Laboratory (LAMUR|CNPq, 2013 - 2023). Thinking about these processes that happen in conviviality is also to question: What is invented while walking with streets, squares, beaches, vacant spaces, subway stations, and university campuses? In these wanderings, some clues were found to affirm the indissociability between art and conviviality based on affects and processes of singularization that resulted from the experiments Let’s Walk, Walking with Urban Vacant Spaces, Walking and Listening, and Creation studio: routes with Univer|Cities. Therefore, the (trans)formative processes discussed in this writing, although unique, converge in the creation of networks of conviviality and conversations, based on invitations to carry out collective walks with the university, the city and its vacant spaces. Among these propositions of ambulation, the desire to invent detours, and suspect what we see and hear. Sensitive and fleeting maps were created with shared intensities, designed by multiple, permeable and unfinished cartographies. In these wanderings, it was possible to become vulnerable to the interferences of space, walking with it, subject and agent of affects and micropolitics.