La Plata, Reimagined City: Overlapping Temporalities and Forms of the Common in Contemporary Art Practice

Abstract

In this article we investigate the conceptions of time and, in particular, of future that are put into practice in two projects located in the city of La Plata (Argentina) that are situated in the space of intersection between art, urban planning, education and political activism: Proyecto Arbórea, a poetic-environmental investigation into public trees; and Proyecto Veredas by La Ciudad Que Resiste, a feminist urban planning collective. In a context of economic, political, environmental and social crisis, these initiatives generate instances of encounter, of thinking about what is common, of articulating ties and networks to imagine other possible worlds. In particular, the cases that make up the corpus think about and intervene in urban space, while revisiting and putting into tension the founding rationalist and hygienist imaginary of the city. To investigate these ideas, we recover the voices of their protagonists through conversations with the members of the selected projects.