[-empyre-] Benjamin, Cortázar, tatto

[Leandro Delgado]

I would make a distinction between loneliness and anonymity. I find
anonymity one of the most powerful creative resources. About loneliness, I
wonder if the city is thus reproducing its own condition or myths in its
writers in the sense that I feel that Montevideo is a lonely city with
almost no connection with no other city around. With “no connection” I mean
exchange of people and services.

About murals, I have been taking pictures of the city murals for years. The
layers that have been painted on the walls renew the city as the skin
mentioned by Sabela. Also murals take our perception to other fields and I
would like to know what “other” means here since the city is already an
overlapping of symbolic fields.

There are many reasons for the the murals and graffitis to exist but I
think in all cases they are marking places that need to be “renewed”,
physically or symbolically.

Finally, and this is just an hypothesis, it is possible that urban painters
or writers (as they call themselves NYC graffiti creators) are expressing
the absence of figurative expressionist painting in official art circuits
dominated but conceptualist art, installations and so on. Of course there
is an infinite variety of styles in urban murals, but I see that most of
them are dominated by the gesture of painting, by the joyful display of a
certain technique.


--




2012/3/12 Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com>

> This week I feel the discussion is changing tone and adding new voices new
> registers new shades of knowledge and feelings. We are having emotions
> here, too seldom discussed on electronic exchanges or in cyberculture. I am
> one of the few of my generation familiar with videogames, as a woman and as
> a writer I has always felt this kind of "otherness". Alicia describes the
> loneliness of the cities as opposed to the rural life. I agree and I can
> refer to my own experience as science-fiction reader and hardcore gamer.
> The game culture is urban, science-fiction is urban as well. Films as Blade
> Runner and Avatar are not possible without the metropolis as metaphore.
> Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite writers, an anarchist by own definition
> and the daughter of the influential anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, writes
> often of urban subjects confronted with new worlds to explore and colonize.
> Those new worlds are often pastoral idylls of sheer and eerie atmosphere,
> unbroken and free from cities in the way we know cities.
> In one of her most known books, "The dispossessed", she  writes about
> anarchists exiled from Earth (Urras) to the Moon (Anarres) and coming back
> to Earth as ambassadors several centuries later.
> Anarres has developed an anarchistic and egalitarian society where
> violence and social unrest are unknown (but stagnation and bureucracy come
> with the package too), Urras is a nightmarish place where war and mayhem
> rules.
> But Le Guin is too skilled as a writer to let her political views be
> stated plainly and pamphletaric, she is very keen of present the two
> societies as stagnant and frozen in time, utopia is always far from our
> reach.
> Ana
>
>
> --
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>
>
> "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
> your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
> long to return.
> — Leonardo da Vinci
>
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