[thematic sessions]
   
 

TS1 - immaterial city
scientific-artistic committee. Margareth da Silva Pereira (coord.) – PROURB/UFRJ; Regina Helena Alves da Silva – PPGCOM and PPGHIS/UFMG; Daniela Brasil - Bauhaus/Weimar

To put at stake the hypertrophy of the material and visual dimensions present in current assumptions of the concept of "city", which insists on ignoring individuals, groups and the diversity of their histories, memories and collective life experiences.
It is intended to discuss the banality of both the praise and the condemnation implicit in expressions abundantly used nowadays: from "generic cities"  towards "cities in transition" or even "unlimited cities". This session wants to explore the fact that these approaches are not innocent and that they neglect the plot that cities are plural constructions, material and immaterial at the same time, but above all they are "embodied", made out of subjectivities, perceptions, expectations, agreements and conflicts. Hence it is exactly in these embodiments  that the intricate constituency of the social, political and cultural dimensions of daily life are framed, interpreted, renewed, represented or just enacted as a shared experience. Situations of nomadism, exiles, hybridisms and miscegenations able to signal the diversity of "cities" that have always been present in the urban experience will be highlighted. It intends, therefore, to legitimize cultural expressions that displace the pregnant concept of city as material, built, visible, static and closed. Moreover, a concept that has already unveiled itself limited on theoretical grounds and being a generator of misapprehensions and exclusions in the cultural and social perspectives. 

TS2 - city as an expanded field of art
scientific-artistic committee. Gloria Ferreira (coord.) – PPGAV/UFRJ, Guilherme Bueno – EAVPL and Ronald Duarte – Imaginário Periférico

To discuss the city as an enlargement of the artistic field. The investigation of different artists' actions during the last decades are drawing a new symbolic cartography of arts, where new connections are weaved with historical, political and social situations, as well as with the flux of the meanings of their own presence in the world. In this sense, it is intended to discuss relationships with the city that outlines a quest for an economy of insertion of art in societies and worldwide, redefining its function, its role, and even of art's practice under present circumstances.

TS3 - urban bodygraphies
scientific-artistic committee. Fabiana Dultra Britto (coord.) –PPG-Dança/UFBA, Paola Berenstein Jacques– PPG-AU/FAUFBA and Alejandro Ahmed- Cena 11

To explore the field of possible relations between body and city, thinking of them as processes of formulation of an ambience and an ambience as an ensemble of conditions to extend this process. Body and city relate to each other, even involuntarily, through each and every urban experience. The city is read by the body as a whole of interactive conditions, and the body expresses the synthesis of this interaction, described in its corporeality. That is exactly what can be addressed as " urban bodygraphy". Investigate the cartographies drawn by and in the body as corporeal evidence of urban experiences, understand the urban space through its corporeal configurations, think the city as an extended phenotype of the body.

TS4 - modes of subjectivation in the city
scientific-artistic committee. Robert Pechman (coord.) – IPPUR/UFRJ, Luis Antônio Batista – PPGPSI/UFF, Eliana Kuster (IPPUR/UFRJ)

How to understand the modes of subjectivation of the contemporary individual in the city? A city is, as we know, more than a simple place, more than a scenery, it transcends the stage. A city is a possibility of a person to be: the more it is introjected in familiar, intimate and personal spheres, the more it seems to structure the self within the family sphere, the more it completes, in fact, the urban being. Well, who thinks that the city does not escape from the "socius" and see him/herself before urbanity: the real "ethos" of a city. But the "ethos" of a city - as in Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire - does not blossom naturally out of asphalt. There is no Nature capable of this feat. On the contrary, it is necessary to sow on this asphalt so that urban flowers can grow. What we want to know is, therefore, which kind of flowers have been planted in urban soil? Moreover, how do they smell? And still, who will harvest them? It is about reflecting/experiencing the urban drifts of the contemporary body around new forms of urbanity, even the ones able to reject the city itself. What would we have in the end? A body without urbanity, consequently without city, whose mode of subjectivation escapes absolutely the ground that gave him/her birth? Which would be finally the equation? Which body, which city? Or its inverse?