This Is My City +853 13th May, 2006
TIMC 09 | TIMC #3 | TIMC #2 | TIMC #1 | TIMC +853
+853 is an event/essay in resistance and counter-culture set in Macau. In a first moment, the event may find justification in the artistic territories of video and design organized in a temporal and spatial itinerary somewhere in a shadowy geography of the city. In a second moment, +853 substantiate the proposal for a dialogue on the issues of contemporaneity, on memory, on difference, on the precarious nature and public and egalitarian character of shared urban space.
It is an event/essay in resistance to the multinational imposition of a dream-city simulacrum, and stands against the tendentiously hegemonic culture of global aseptization and indifference.
In the wake of the North-American architect Michael Sorkin, this event can be said to attempt the re-appropriation of the progressive Utopian speech by operating a re-conversion of the concept: the utopia, the invention of a better place and an inventory of images and local cultures of resistance, thence the urgency to edify alternative symbolic systems, to generate differences and local autonomy capable of bringing about distinct and emancipated cities.
The choice of +853 for the title of this event hints at that local distinction, but also at the possibility of establishing a dialogue and integrating the web of global flows by appropriating cultural strategies of demarcation, creating utilitarian alliances in the final attempt to elaborate, in this circumstance, a local catalog of impossibilities. Only thus will it be possible to have a virtue-oriented propaganda capable of ensuring the global inscription of local difference. And only thus will Macau and the citizens-to-come be able to lay the foundations of the impossible emancipation.
