What if I Were in Your Shoes?: Learning from the ‘Real World’ with Immersive Political-aesthetic Installations

Abstract

In this work, we study how immersive artistic-political-aesthetic experiences could serve as a way to generate knowledge from personal displacements and from what we can call ‘learning from’. We explore how artistic experiences in exhibitions can both shape and respond to social and political change through attempts of bringing different social groups closer together through empathic approaches. We debate the ideas of ‘learning from’; ‘dialectical image’; and ‘ordinary’. These concepts are brought to the spotlight in the artistic and social experience provided by our immersive video installation ‘Framed City: bodies in transit’ at the 13th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, 2022. The installation experience brings the audience closer to a recurrent part of the working class routine in Brazilian metropolises: daily long hours tied to commuting by public transportation. For that, ‘Framed City’ space synthesizes the environment of a regular bus and puts the participant in the shoes of a metropolitan working-class individual – watching degraded peripheral landscapes pass through the windows (TVs) and listening to other people’s conversations (stories told by representatives of a chosen working social group). Through interviews we have found out that this experience instigates reflections on representativeness, empathy and understandings of the city from other narratives and points of view. The immersive installation plays both an social and inclusive role: it brings visitors closer to a setting that is ordinary but does not belong to them; and it gives voice to marginalized social groups that do not usually find representation in such spaces.

Presenters

Victória Helena Michelini Junqueira
Student, Master's Student in Culture, Landscape and Built Environment, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro , Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Melanie Martins
Architect and Urban Planner, Graduate Program in Architecture (PROARQ/UFRJ), PROARQ FAU UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Pedro Vitor Costa
Student, Bachelor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2023 Special Focus—-New Aesthetic Expressions: The Social Role of Art

KEYWORDS

EMPATHY, IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE, INSTALLATION, LEARNING FROM, NARRATIVE DISPLACEMENT, SOCIAL REPRESENTATIVENESS

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