Art and the city. A meeting on the border

Abstract

The essay departs from the ancient greek myth of Prometheus, symbolizing the idea of progress and the passage of man from a state of nature to a state of artifice, in order to critics the modern perspective of “unlimited growth”, brought about by hyper-liberalist capitalism. It contextualizes this prometheian-like dynamics of “rushing into modernity” within the phenomena of implosion and explosion of cities today. A post urban / post rural kingdom where man seems to have abandoned the notion of territory, contemplated as a resource to be exploited only, as a result of the breaking down of the co-evolutionary relationship between human settlement, nature and work. Against this pessimistic tableu, the essay points at the idea of “crisis” as a fertile possibility to reintegrate discrepancy in our societies, pushing us to seek solutions in the emergence of new answers, leading to the experimentation with new forms of narration and representation exploring new languages. Another way of looking and knowing reality which steers the regeneration of the gaze forward in interpreting and planning territories.