Devir-criança e infantilização pela Rua Sete em Vitória (ES): narrativas para a ilha rever

Abstract

This work aims to create narratives of Rua Sete de Setembro, in the Center of Vitória (ES), in rupture to the dominant levels that treat it as an empty place. Therefore, we bring the concepts of infantilization and becoming-child closer to the architecture and urbanism's field. We consider infantilization as a strategy of the capitalistic subjectivity production machine that removes the individual capacity to think and organize life. The concept of becoming-child, in turn, refers to lines of escape, processes of deterritorialization, focus of a micropolitics that acts in everyday life experience and connects with the perception of children before they being modeled by the production equipment. To access the becoming-child is about entering the field of experimentation, subverting adult logic and abandoning the mask that imposes limits, domestics and discourages. We assume a methodological approach incorporated by becoming-child to research, manipulate and write with the affections felt by our cartographer- researcher vibrating body at searching for other becoming-children in the city. Such affections, seemingly random encounters, came about through field research and documentary collection. With them, we created a database made of heterogeneous documents in their species and data - photographs, newspaper clippings, correspondence and official publications, maps, architectural designs, interviews, and logbook annotations. The documents were considered as fragments in which we played at chapters-blocks of photography-drawing-tale-discussion. The thematic choice of each chapter-block was guided by the tension between attempts at infantilization and becoming-child related to the use of public space by children, the street carnival, and bars with their sidewalk tables. At Rua Sete and its surroundings, this tension is alive at least from the end of the 19th century. The work highlights the innumerable possibilities of document combinations and indicates the power of becoming-children to think, narrate and write the island of Vitória from other angles and perspectives.