The body does not leave the city: transference, public art, and urban experience

Abstract

Transference, a notion central to the field of psychoanalysis, is here displaced in order to think of urban experience as a sensitive field traversed by body, memory, and space. The essay approaches transference as a relational dynamic that becomes bodily actualized in contact with the city—not as an interpretive mechanism, but as a lived event. In dialogue with body studies, urban thought, contemporary artistic practices, and phenomenological approaches to experience, the text affirms the body as archive and method, a place where the city settles, insists, and reinscribes itself. The city is understood as an active field of forces in which historical and normative survivals emerge as atmospheres, frictions, and perceptual displacements. Public art and urban performance appear as operators that sustain this field, reorganizing regimes of visibility and presence. An analysis of actions by Desvio Coletivo demonstrates how the collective body produces a situated urban writing, articulating urban transference with the notion of urban corpography as a living script of experience in the city.