Acceso usuarios
Tessa Maria Guazon
In this article, public art is proposed as creative agency mobilized to form urbanimaginaries. These alternate visions are largely facilitated by artists and art collectivesusing urban communities as performative grounds. These projects promote a view of artas an effective channel for ‘recentering’— the identification of a multitude of centers thatendlessly fracture and shift, very much resembling the nature of cities themselves. Analternate vision of the city through cartography informed by contrast, temporality andephemerality is proposed alongside dominant representations of the city. Works by artistsAlma Quinto, Mark Salvatus and Wire Tuazon are representative examples of suchstrategies. Diverse in tactics and platforms, defined by site-specific mediations,the projects facilitated by these artists reveal the uneven conditions that beset MetroManila and its outlying areas. Quinto’s altered Urban Plan/Duyan is the result of herengagement with women in an informal settler community in San Andres Bukid, Manila,while Salvatus’s web-based Neo-Urban Planner is an astute observation of the obsessiveyet futile ordering of people and space by the state. Tuazon’s Amphibian installation isa commentary on the encroachment of multinational interests in local communities.These interventions are foils to state- and private-led urban development schemes. Theirstrength lies in their direct engagement with the sphere of public dialogue andself-determination. These artistic practices and strategies are shaped by communityinteraction, revealing that meanings residing in urban forms are relentlessly negotiatedby the numerous actors that inhabit the city.
