Scratch the city in gestures and trails, walks and images

Urban writings as an urban act of micropolitical potency

Abstract

The practices of the collective Narrativas Possíveis, from Fortaleza/CE, are transmuted in the research Cidade Caminhante, in which, through walking, we seek the encounter with urban writings (phrases and words left on the surfaces of the city in the form of graffiti, stencil, wheat-paste). To this end, we mobilized a combination of research methods-tactics: walking, photography, audiovisual and drawing. In this article, we share two of the walks taken in the Center of Fortaleza/CE, in order to, through encounters with such images, think about the ways in which they operate in the city. Perceiving the relationship between what urban writing does and what it says, we understand that what is at stake in these images is not only what is scratched, but the very gesture, contained in the trail and prolonged, of scratching the city, that also configures a way of perceiving it, of “unarchiving” the gesture through the look. Between gestures and traces, the urban writings, carrying phrases “of love” or “of protest”, are configured as an urban action of micropolitical potency, by inventing tactics of existence in the city, such as walking, perceiving and inhabiting it in other ways.