Crash Course in Critical/Creative Urban Intervention

Location/Time: Mondays, 7-9pm at This Ain't the Rosedale LIbrary, 483 Church St. [starting May 16th]

Course facilitators: Rose Bianchini and Christopher Smith

Contact: urbanintervention@graffiti.net

(course description)

There is a growing community of artists and activists in Toronto who engage in ‘urban intervention’. Broadly defined as the practice of intervening in the conditioned, taken-for-granted patterns of everyday life in the city, urban interventions seek to create moments of rupture and inter/dis-ruption in the state of order, boredom, monotony, and acute social alienation that have come to characterize contemporary urban life. Encompassing a broad spectrum of different critical/creative techniques and models, urban interventions can range from carnivalesque direct actions involving large numbers of people, to individual, performative acts of guerilla street theatre.

Often artistic and always political, the modern practice of urban intervention carries on the avant-garde project of attempting to unite art, politics and everyday life, actively challenging conventional ways of seeing, inhabiting, moving through and engaging with the city. While they can take an infinite number of forms, most kinds of urban intervention generally share a number of common criteria. Firstly, urban interventions are public- directly or indirectly they seek to critique and engage with the shifting politics of public space. Secondly, interventions are often performative- they encourage the adoption of identities and modes of being that are different from the everyday (which is itself often critiqued as being a performance). Thirdly, many kinds of intervention are participatory- they actively seek to inspire and incite interactivity, problematizing the role of the passive spectator. Fourthly, interventions are political- consciously drawing attention to social, political and economic issues within the city. And finally, interventions are playful, illustrating how acts of (political) protest and critique can be accomplished without violence or the traditionally somber tone that characterizes most formal demonstrations.

Composed of a series of interactive discussions with local, Toronto-based practitioners, this course will seek to examine and critique a diverse array of different forms and models of (critical/creative, political/poetic) urban intervention, including autonomous acts of urban beautification, attempts to disrupt the state of social alienation that pervades the city, performative anti-consumerist actions, and collective, carnivalesque assertions of the right to public space. After the introductory class meeting, where we will work on collectively defining and debating the notion of ‘urban intervention’, the remainder of the course will be devoted to participatory, interactive workshops with local artists and activists whose work can be seen as being interventionist in nature, including the Toronto Public Space Committee (TPSC: www.publicspace.ca), the Urban Beautification Brigade (UBB), the City Beautification Ensemble (CBE: www.beautification.ca), and the Free Dance Lessons project. As opposed to simply showcasing the work of different interventionist projects, however, the course will ideally come to resemble the form of a DJ ‘battle’, where different practitioners can playfully face off against— and thereby creatively challenge— one another on some of the critical issues involved in ‘urbanvention’. By creating an open, anarchist-oriented forum for critically examining contemporary practices of urban intervention, the course will aim to both strengthen and challenge the existing community of Toronto-based urban interventionists, and inspire and generate new critical/creative models for disrupting the everyday urban cityscape.

(tentative course outline)

Week 1 (May 16): Framing the Debates

Questioning the relationship between intent and effect, form and function, the introductory course meeting will seek to both broadly define the notion of urban intervention and to frame some of the key debates that have served to inform this emerging practice. After broadly outlining some of the main issues involved in urban intervention, the course group will work to collectively contribute to and finalize the class schedule.

• performance versus participation (can performative models of urban intervention serve to encourage and invite active participation?)
• playful versus political (can political ends be accomplished through playful means?)
• spectatorship versus engagement (can engagement be inspired through passive spectatorship?)
• anonymity versus attribution (what does it mean to practice anonymous forms of urban intervention and what is the value of attribution?)
• permanence versus ephemerality (what is the difference between models of urban intervention that aspire to permanent change as opposed to temporary transformation?)
• outreach versus direct action (how can different forms of intervention seek to strike a balance between militant, direct actions and public outreach?)
• independent versus institutional (what is the difference between institutionally-sponsored/sanctioned and independent forms of urban intervention? can urban intervention be accomplished from within state and private institutions?)

Week 2 (May 23): Public Art/Space and the Poetics of Urban Beautification

• What are the poetics, politics, and problematics of urban beautification?
• How do aesthetic forms of urban intervention point to larger issues in the politics of urban public space?
• What kind of relationship to the ‘public’ do different forms of urban beautification attempt to articulate?
• How do practices of urban beautification suggest/encourage/enact new ways of relating to, inhabiting, and engaging with the physical/material space (i.e. ‘built form’) of the city?
• Urban Beautification Brigade, City Beautification Ensemble, TPSC's Art Attack, graffiti, etc.

Week 3 (May 30): Engaging Social Alienation: Spontaneous Social Interaction as Urban Intervention

• How do social models of urban intervention seek to disrupt and directly intervene in the (socially) alienating, atomizing, individualizing landscape of everyday urban life?
• How can performative models and means be used to engender active participation and discourage passive spectatorship?
• Forty years ago, Guy Debord wrote that our society “tends to atomize people into isolated consumers, to prohibit communication” effectively making everyday life a “private life, the realm of separation and spectacle”. How does urbanvention overcome what Debord called ‘everyday alienation’: “the inability to invent a technique for the liberation of everyday experience”? (71)
• What can social models of urban intervention—and the sense of social alienation that they seek to disrupt— tell us about the infrastructure of surveillance and spectacle which condition and structure our everyday (social) experience of the city?
• Free Dance Lessons, subway parties, ‘social capital’, pedestrian mobs

Week 4 (June 6): The (Temporary, Autonomous) Urban Carnival

• How and to what extent do collective, carnivalesque forms of urban intervention engage in a critique of the contemporary politics of public space?
• What kinds of relationships do (temporary, autonomous) urban carnivals form with the public and with the police(state)?
• In what ways do urban carnivals accommodate, invite or discourage active participation from random passers-by? In what ways do they problematize passivity and spectatorship?
• How do the existing models of carnivalesque urban intervention (i.e. Reclaim the Streets) serve to invite and bring together, and simultaneously marginalize and exclude different groups and individuals?
• How can collective, carnivalesque expressions of play and creativity convey a coherent political critique?
• Reclaim the Streets, Pedestrian Sundays [PS] Kensington, Free Tekno, NIght of Dread

Week 5 (June 13): Interventions In/Through Space: Design, Planning, Architecture and Urbanvention

Week 6 (June 20): Public Performance and Guerilla Street Theatre

Week 7 (June 23): Concluding the Course: Models for Action

(readings etc.)

Although this is primarily designed as a participatory, workshop-based course, short readings may be assigned from week to week. Participants will be expected to bring their own critical/creative energy and ideas to the course, with the intention of both challenging already existing models of urban intervention, and contributing to the construction of new collaborative projects.

Disclaimer:

• technological requirements will largely have to be orgznied by the course participants
• some of the course sessions may be (audio-visually) documented- please contact the course facilitators to express any concerns or reservations about documentation