An ephemeral urban museum

Urban artistic action as a/r/tographic research resource to inquire about the abstract image of the city

Abstract

This study emerges with the intention of highlighting and rediscovering the aesthetic qualities of urban forms through performance and photography. With this proposal, we do not aim to emphasize the values of environments understood generically as beautiful, according to traditional or conventional urban models, which are associated with postcard photography that perpetuates stereotypical clichés of the city. We will defend the idea that there is a high aesthetic potential in certain places within our more peripheral neighborhoods (both territorially and conceptually). A potential that, at first glance, would go unnoticed by a less attentive or unconcerned gaze, even more so in this moment marked by speed, overstimulation and visual overconsumption. We believe that the city, in itself, is evocative, inspiring, provocative, playful and therefore highly interesting and educational. Here, we want to get to know our cities more and better, while we energize and revolutionize our daily habits through artistic creation.

We present here the results of an artistic and research project that aims to shape a temporary museum scattered throughout the city, with the ultimate intention of recognizing its landscapes through the transformative potential of art and visual creation. For this purpose, we will place a series of abstract artworks in correlation with specific urban fragments. Each of the actions taken is based on the theory of artistic-urban performance, which reveals the visual findings of a teaching practice. It seeks to extrapolate the results obtained within the framework of an art education subject at the Faculty of Education Sciences in Granada, from an a/r/tographic and visual methodological perspective. This art education project, based on the creative interpretation of abstract art, led to the exploration of the urban image from multiple reinterpretative possibilities. The educational experience consisted of recognizing various abstract works and interpreting them in the city, achieving this translation through photography, which has become a common medium in our contemporary digital habits. In this way, those of us who participated in the experiences utilized a new form of urban and architectural photography that embraced visual abstraction as a representational strategy, forcing us to look at the city in a different way. It offered a new path for poetic exploration of reality, seeking to transform our daily habits and routines through visual and photographic creation and reflection (Figure 2).

From this a/r/tographical approach, the artistic, research, and educational actions culminates in the appropriation of the visual connections found by university students between the urban and artistic abstraction. Each relationship leads us to a point in the city, ultimately transforming it into one of the rooms of our instant museum. The series of artworks we started with, featuring prominent creators like Kline, Pollock, or Malevich, were juxtaposed with each urban and architectural environment where they were reflected by placing the reference work in the same location. As a result, we established fifty-eight specific situations spread across different neighborhoods of Granada, from the historic center to the outskirts, which made numerous people spontaneous spectators of the performative processes. On the other hand, a large portion of the population was able to access the results through the installation of QR codes in each of these locations, serving as links to information related to the artwork that had sparked the entire spatial intervention. These back-and-forth processes from the arts to the city, and back to the artistic realm, demonstrated the creative and recursive validity, the artistic relevance, and the influence that a key movement in modern art, developed since the mid-20th century, has had on contemporary urban cultures. This ephemeral museum allowed us to explore the city in an active way with a renewed perspective. In fact, it continues to invite us to do so even after the experiences that generated it have concluded, having transformed our urban imagination from an artistic and metaphorical standpoint.