Spurensicherung - Retaining Traces. The Urban Ground as an Archive of Reparative Ecologies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22409/arte.lugar.cidade.v1i2.65124Keywords:
urban grounds, urban rivers, critical zones, healing, repairAbstract
This article draws from the German artistic tradition of Spurensicherung/“securing traces” to explore how new ways of healing, repair and reparation emerge from urban space, and in particular, from its both lively and polluted, elemental/unruly and heavily constructed grounds. In a first part of the article, I explore how Berlin’s postwar “rubble soils” have from the 1970s generated new alliances at the intersection of soil arts and science that troubles ideas of elemental “purity” and “renaturalization” thus presenting urban soils as disruptive archives. The article then moves on to present-day São Paulo to argue that new ecopolitical movements that trace the urban grounds for its hidden rivers and riparian communities are not simply “evidencing”, but rather producing new human-material collectivities of witnesses that enact multiple pasts, presents and futures to claim environmental justice and to practice care and reparation of all kinds.
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