Abstract:
This research is based on the observation that we are bombarded by images and subjected to visual overstimulation, which has affected our individual capacity for contemplative perception and created an anesthetic effect. The problem becomes more pronounced when the predominance of visual experience extends beyond the collective urban space and establishes other ways of coexisting in the contemporary city. In this sense, at a time of technological fear, in which the production of knowledge is disputed by artificial intelligence, and it is necessary to constantly check the veracity of facts and shared images, the research aims to reflect on the reconfigurations of the relationship between experience, image, and urban space that are prevalent today. To this end, it focuses on the history and urban transformation of a space built to be image-oriented and spectacularized by the tourism industry, the Barra waterfront, Salvador, based on photographs, postcards, advertising images, films, memories, personal stories, and our field reports. Between image, imaginary, and imagination, the research seeks a way of doing that flashes back to the past to find possible futures not yet given. We use Benjamin's dialectical image to think about doing research, doing history, and doing city from a movement that is made up of leaps. It is in this open interval between anachronistic leaps that we believe the imaginative possibility we seem to be lacking still resides. In this montage of fragments, faced with the primacy of visual experience and the spectacularization of spaces, we ask what is still possible to imagine in our cities, when imagining is, above all, a political act.
