Urban borders and dissident poetics: analysis of three cases in Belo Horizonte (MG)

Abstract

This essay investigates how artistic and cultural insurgencies produce memories and representations able to claim the right to the city (Lefebvre, 2006) and wage cultural citizenship (Chauí, 1995) of subaltern groups, through three experiences in Belo Horizonte: the Museum of Quilombos and Urban Favelas (MUQUIFU), the Espanca! Theater and the Common Space Luiz Estrela. We understand the city as a field of disputes, symbolics and materials, in which cultural insurgent praxis emerge in borders zones, understood as critical spaces in which inclusion and exclusion are tensioned, such as centre and margins (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Methodologically, the research combined interviews, participant observation, documental and imagery analysis, mobilizing montage as an interpretative procedure (Benjamin, 1994). Taking borders as a category, we oriented the case selection and the analysis itself of how art, memory, and resistance are articulated in order to create counter-narratives. The results indicate that MUQUIFU re-enroll black and popular memories in the in-between place between favela and formal city, Espanca! shifts cultural hierarchies by articulating aesthetics, politics, and territory in the Belo Horizonte’s so-called hypercentre, finally Luiz Estrela converts an abandoned ruin into a self-managed space and collective experimentation. In common, these initiatives contest official narratives, affirm marginalised knowledge and institute new ways of belonging and political visibility. Note that these praxises expand the notion of the right to the city beyond housing and public equipment access, setting it as a collective creation praxis, appropriation and dwelling, in which culture is the field of resistance and insurgent citizenship production.