Paper short abstract:

How do spatial practices exercise their dissent towards institutions? What are the actions they embody and the projects they carry out? The contribution explores critical potential of oppositional practices in their relation with institutions, by presenting the ethnography of Stalker in Rome.

Paper long abstract:

The research looks at oppositional spatial practices and their relationship with institutions. Asking whether their spatial interventions can exercise a transformative power and a critical potential, it looks at how selected collectives have carried out their “dissenting” projects. Those practices are oppositional since they aim to deform the institutional system they encounter, yet face constant compromises and negotiations to make their projects happen. The research is positioned at the crossing of feminist studies and STS methods of inquiry, and it has followed the effects of the practices, actions, and their narrations. Institutions are defined as endlessly in motion: they are artefacts and are not naturally given. The observed practices have a programmatic intent of interfering with the institutional dimension they wish to deform. The research has followed ethnographically selected practices acting across spatial and architectural domains and has traced the spaces of possibilities created by these deformations. The contribution will present the work of Stalker, a collective active in Rome since 1995. The collective is ungraspable by intention and manages to enter and exit institutions constantly:they do so, through actions, walks, installations and performances. They walk to establish a new set of relationships and to question traditional urban methods; they join the socio-ecological struggles of local activists practising embodiment as a political and ethical choice, and they explore urban wilderness exercising abandonment as an act of care. The paper will discuss the results of a two-year embodied ethnography and question this method of inquiry as an approach to knowledge.