Paper short abstract:

This panel will explore how urban disorentation can be used as a method of observation for studying the city from an ethnographic point of view. The discussion will take as its starting point my research conducted in Cape Town into the signification of urban spaces in the post-Apartheid period.

Paper long abstract:

Is the state of disorientation we experience when we find ourselves in an unknown city a limitation or an opportunity when it comes to observing the city? In this panel the state of

being extraneous and of disorientation is understood as a privileged state for observing the city. Feeling uprooted and alienated are considered as fundamental moments which enable the researcher to raise himself to new cognitive possibilities through a result which is "soiled" by intermixing and chance encounters between rational, perceptive and emotional levels in a blend which only the city knows how to produce.

The wanderings of the French Surrealists, Guy Debord's Situationism, and the figure of the metropolitan flaneur described by Walter Benjamin represent the fundamental triggers for a deliberation on urban disorientation. Taking these works as my starting point, I will aim to develop a deliberation on urban disorientation understood as a privileged moment in the ethnographic observation of the city.

It is also my intention to explore how the use of photography and the recording of ambient sounds can be crucial tools for the observation of the city through disorientation.

Finally, I will describe salient moments from my fieldwork in Cape Town with the aim of observing and representing the processes of urban signification in the post-Apartheid period.