Decolonizing the capital: political-affective cartography of wandering bodies around the city of Brasília

Abstract

Based on the analysis of urban interventions by four artists and collectives from both the central and peripheral areas of the Federal District, I propose the development of a brief political-affective cartography of Brasília, whose original urban design is characterized
by constituting a segregating device that, to this day, grants to the city one of the greatest social inequalities in the country. To achieve this, I initially turn to the concept of decolonial aesthetics as a theoretical-epistemological framework to decentralize the role of representation and visual stimulation in the arts, prioritizing other forms of meaning production by aisthesis, placing the body as an agent of city occupation, as proposed by the practice of delirium ambulatorium in Hélio Oiticica’s work. I find in the discussed artists echoes of the tropicalist painter and sculptor in the aesthetic practice of walking and wandering as a possibility to merge the body with space, constituting a subversive way of understanding the formation of subjectivities in the neoliberal urban context.