The skateboarder as allegorist and collector of urban images: reflections on the "Flanantes"

Abstract

“Flanantes” is an independent audiovisual collective formed in 2015 by urban skateboarders from the city of São Paulo. Inspired by Walter Benjamin, we look at the skateboard videos of the collective,  which are the subject of this work, not as a “mirror” of society, but as its monadologically crystallized self-reflection, that is, as a moment in which society reflects on itself from a specific point of view. Based on this, the first part of the text explores the production of the “Flanantes” through the collective's foundational approximation between the flâneur and the skateboarder. From this approximation, we unfold an interpretation of the skater's activity in urban space, synthesized in the notion of allegorical praxis: a modus operandi that consists of subverting the original meanings of objects and spaces in the city, reorienting them according to a ludic imperative. With this in mind, the second part of the text moves from the practice of skateboarding in cities to the skateboard videos, an audiovisual genre that shapes the skater's point of view, organizing and mediating his collection of urban images. Based on these developments, we turn to the skateboard videos of the collective as a whole, which, along the way, reveal themselves to be an extreme case of their genre.