Atlas: percursos imaginários, cidades em movimento

Abstract

This research presents possibilities for an expanded practice of urbanism through its intersection with experimental and collective processes of fields such as visual arts and graphic editorial design. To this end, it sets in motion a reunion of ideas, practices and images (technical and metaphorical), having as its main methodological and epistemological inspiration the way of thinking propossed by the German art historian Aby Warburg in his Atlas Mnemosyne (1924-1929), recently explored in depth by theorists like Georges Didi-Huberman (2013) and Paola Berenstein Jacques (2020). Thought not only (but also) as an editorial and scientific genre, the atlas is presented from multiple points of view, in an attempt to excavate some points of the wide territory of meanings and migrations that were constituted over five centuries around this word. Far from trying to compose an exhaustive historical or theoretical panorama, this survey seeks instead to find points where relations can be woven and expanded through the intersection with other texts presenting contemporary artistic, anthropological and urban processes, in addition to experimentation processes carried out in parallel with the development of this research. The collection of fragments, in constant recombination through experimentation with different supports, helps also to think about the co-implications between forms, processes and ways of spatializing knowledge. The elusive and multifaceted image that is composed in this process, presents a way of thinking about the urban space that, impure, multiple, imprecise and always unfinished as the city itself is, refuses the rigidity of scientific and technical models in favor of critical and collective experimentation guided by the mobilization of the imagination.