Drifting with Street Art: Lived Corners

To drift through Lavapiés, Madrid. The dérive, drifting, as a Situationist practice,  is “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” (Debord). It involves “ludic-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects” and it is thus not the same as the classic journey or stroll through the city.  As a cultural strategy one does not engage in a dérive to run into a fortituous encounter that may trigger the unconscious, as in the case of the Surrealist wandering: as a method, the dérive seeks to produce a subversive relation with everyday life in the capitalist city  (Hal Foster et al., 2006: 394).  Here leisure time, free time, is understood as the other side of alienated work  (394). To drift: attentively looking at, and listening to ,the city walls:

metal and wood sheets, stencils, tags, traces of social struggles, graffiti pieces.   To drift.  Street behaviors and practices on the wall: play: desire to communicate and to affirm oneself ephemerally: to transit and pass opening lines of fugue. To inhabit the ethics of street art:  the other side of alienated work,  of the precarious work that has invaded Madrid, global city of the financial flows.  Ludic labor on the street open to all: lived corners:

Lavapiés, 26 June 2016.

Advertisement