How to Use a Monument Performance as a Way of Reflecting on the Role of Monuments in Today’s Cities

Design-driven research can be useful for the understanding of the complexity of the city and its changes today. This pragmatic attitude is aimed at transforming and renegotiating the creative process, now rendered explicit through its interaction with all the transgressions of disciplinarity: inter, multi, trans, extra, anti and non-disciplinary, insisting on the notions of doing and thinking. Operating as a critical approach, of which the initial intentions are based on contextual logics, situations, and relations, the objective is to generate alternative imaginaries for a space, a community, a city, or a society. This requires the activation of a continuous process of formation and transfer of knowledge and expertise between practice and theory, in order to make them accessible through creative means.

The research uses a design-driven and practice-based process to explore and unfold particular aspects of the interaction between place-making and the arts, in the context of urban renewal. It starts with imagining alternative scenarios for a place, by being directed by on-site existing conditions such as relations between people, places, stories, and objects. The method involves gathering textual and visual data from these present and past factors, and through them operates a translation into built structures. The design of these structures involves a reading of the information collected on-site through the creative/artistic lens. During the in-situ actions, new emerging stories for the place are can be discussed and tested by the local community through physically built structures that people can directly act and react upon. This produces a framework, a public stage in which the community performance can generate discussions, collaboration, and actions.