Rua Chile: estilhaços de uma via movimento

Abstract

What is the writing of the city that is consistent with its multiple temporalities, its multiple spatialities, its diversity? What is the writing of the city that makes coherent its fragmented and dispersed spatiality, its different plots? In the quest to understand and write a space, a street in transformation, where tractors, pickaxes and shovels turn over its soil, letting various pieces and shards emerge, we chose to look at the materiality that makes up Chile – its buildings, its stones, its bricks – in another way. One of the challenges that this street poses to us, among many others, is that of thinking about matter in a globalized world dominated by immaterial productions of value, such as financial capital, which operates on the materiality of the world, as if it were just a product to be consumed and discarded. Dealing with the vitality of matter in space, and here we focus on a street in the Historic Center of one of the most touristic cities in Brazil, is also a quest to understand the role of materiality in an increasingly impalpable world, converted into images ready to be consumed as soon as possible. The constant movement of looking at Rua and being looked at by it was and is that of collecting and gathering shards, splinters, fragments, and assembling them into momentary configurations. These configurations are open to anyone willing to play the game, to play the game. The story of Rua Chile is not just one, and can be told at any time from another or other perspectives that generate new and/or possible other Ruas Chiles.