Random City: the “infraordinary” that stands out in Letícia Lampert’s urban landscapes

Abstract

This paper focuses on the work Random City (2017), by Brazilian photographer and visual artist Letícia Lampert, created from photographs from different parts of the world. By cutting and assembling images of cities such as Paris, Fortaleza, São Paulo, New York and Sanghai, unprecedented urban landscapes are created. In the creative process, the photographer selects everyday clippings, which often go unnoticed, and puts them together to form a city that contains parts of several others. We seek to highlight the presence of the “infraordinary” (PEREC, 1989) that emerges in this work, based on a walk among Lampert’s images, also bringing references from other artists, such as the photographer Claudia Jaguaribe. We then perceive a parallel between the perspective of the "infraordinary" of Perec (1989), the "punctum" of Barthes (2018) and the "sublime" of Lopes (2007). As a methodological path, we built boards inspired by Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne, which allowed glimpses of other perceptions to emerge from the union of images.