(in)visible cities

The city is a space of transformations, appropriations and expansions. Considering the structure of the city in the context of the production system, we find many parallels. The production process of assembly can be defined as an organized sequence of performing independent operations on objects that pass through various stages. Such stages in the city are various local communities, social movements, individual statements that are formed and exist in the urban environment, creating a hybrid space and multi-temporality. In the body of the city, an important place is occupied by control bodies. 

Today, the growing discourse on safety and efficiency is closely linked to ideas of oversight. For example, control of the movement of citizens and face recognition through outdoor surveillance cameras encode and decode the space and the subject in it. Trends in “invisible” tracking were noted by many philosophers of the late 20th century. “Disciplinary societies are doomed to be replaced by societies of control. ‘Control’ is the word that Burroughs uses to designate a new monster, and Foucault sees this as our near future.” (J. Deleuze “Society of Control”) The conveyor belt — a metaphor for city streets — puts the object in a vise, the body is enslaved as a player, and as an object of the game. Through interaction with architecture, time and place, as well as other human and non-human “players”, adaptation to the panoptical space takes place. 

Analyzing the processes within the city, the artists act out a play, weaving a network of topical problems and creating allegories of today’s life. “The spectacle is an extension of the idea of ​​reification, where what was directly lived has moved into representation, and all real relations have been replaced by relations with commodities, where commodities have a life of their own — an autonomous movement of the inanimate. The spectacle is the dominance of social interaction mediated by images” (Guy Debord “The Society of the Spectacle”) Thus, we can say that the exhibition is a representation of representation. An integrated performance about a society in which the eternal present reigns. 

Natalia Drachinskaya and Natalia Kazakova