Paper short abstract:

Through collaborative workshops, I explore invisible changes in the intimate sphere at Madrid and Montevideo. The poetics of daily life embedded in “micronarratives of the self” can be read as an agonistic genre of discourse having to do with the struggles of metropolization.

Paper long abstract:

How are the forms of urbanity changing? What role do have the emergence, politization and visibilization of the intimate sphere in such changes? Can we get political or poetical insights from them?

These are the questions at the base of my current ethnography on the metropolization of living between young and modern not-so-young dwellers in Madrid (Spain) and Montevideo (Uruguay). By means of collaborative workshops for collective exploration -open to further visual ethnography at the home setting- I deal with an object that could be referred to as "micronarratives of the self": an agonistic plot where the heroic ego (sometimes parodical or tragicomic) is the main character in the Sisific task of "making yourself" in the big city -so affirming his/her space for authonomy, among the facilitations/obstacles provided by other actants like parents, couple, friends and others.

My content is that the poetics of daily life embedded in such stories result from a new regime of urbanity. On the one hand, they question and trespass the limits taken for granted in a more classical, canonical urban common sense of first modernity, with their eroded couplets public/private, production/consumption. With the remapping of boundaries, also their implicit invisibilization, devaluation and subordination of the domestic space become eroded. Second, they reveal the emergence of a new regime embodying the current, contemporary fascination with the creative, the quotidian, the affective and the intimate -a fascination easily contained in the trope extimacy.