The city and the skin: public space and pudic space

Grafitis de protesta en un descampado de Vallcarca, Bcn. Foto Livia Motterle, 2016.

Barcelona, September 13-15, IV European conference on the geographies of sexualities! click here for info

“The city of bonfires implodes, one brick at a time, under the voracious weight of the bulldozers, hungry for neighborhoods and dreams. It tries to open its wings on the burning asphalt, seeking space among the translucent cracks that still defy capitalism. This epidermic urge turns into a net, that tries to catch the parasite of real estate speculation, stirring in an utopian attempt to erect some new burning ritual. Flesh blends into stone; entrails into pavements; barricades into scars, begging to the pudic space to return public.

“The skin is the deepest thing there is. Paul Valery knew this well. The fissures of the skin, the striate wrinkles of the flesh, reveal the word, the action. In the guts of the streets, in the corners of small alleys crowded with interstices and horizons, urban life palpitates in revenge against urban planning. We are city, we are the city. We are the city that refuses to die, that knows no rest, sunken in the construction of collective narratives of enjoyment.

“While we map the territory following the traces of pleasure, we might find the place where the two parallel vectors of sexuality and public space converge: the aleph where everything meets, burns and is nourished. We are left with just the skin, with its vices and wounds, to remind us that we are just bodies, bodies that live in a public dimension, performing infractions, smuggling dances and laughters, and creating dissent in a city rotten with its pudicity”.

INCONTRO con LARRY KNOPP_LOCANDINANext September 11 (!) geographer of sexualities LARRY KNOPP will be in Rome for a conference. From the presentation of the event: “Larry Knopp is a crucial reference point on geography of sexualities. Since the 80s until present he worked on different aspects of this topic, from the earliest cases of gay gentrification, to the relation among urban space, LGBTQ movements, and local politics. In Rome Knopp will present the preliminary results of a study he is conducting together with his colleague Michael Brown, another unavoidable reference person for the studies on the topic. Their project is an historical reflection on the evolution of the relationship between the city and LGBTQ people, based on the analysis of four cities in the USA, over a time of almost fifty years”.