Thirteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

In the special issue titled Art and Urban Studies, programmed in both journals Arts and Architecture, we started noticing the secret life of the cities. These not institutionalized part of the cities build themselves. Artistic strategies learn from social behaviors, reply to politic decisions, generate mathematic knowledge. A web of transitions make us modify the environment we belong to. For a greater understanding of the changes that are taking place in cities, we must take into account the complexity of current moments. The crucible of large-scale natural disasters, wars, pandemics, and so forth has sky-rocketed the already dynamic metamorphosis of cities, both in their spatial structures and in the social processes that sustain them. For its part, the active insertion of art in the city has generated a continuous exploration of public art, collective social expressions, light experimentations, spatial speculations, the interactivity of urban devices, the recovery of the heritage of antique buildings, and urban cradles. These questions have been manifested in the city and in artistic discourses about urban spaces, including the traditional fine arts (landscape painting as recognition of the awareness of urban space, or the artistic dimension of cartography), audio–visual arts, and new interactive formats. These aspects are what we want to highlight in this session.