Rewriting the city: Urban anti-narratives on Martha Rosler, Janet Cardiff and Candy Chang’s works

Abstract

The urban space, conceived as a living framework where different identities that inhabit and travel it come together, involves a source of inspiration for the artist as well as a favorable place for his action and experimentation. It critically analyzes the underground issues hidden under the fake idea of the planned community, lifeless and permanent. This paper has the aim of identifying some of the strategies that were used on artistic and community actions, all of them woven into the social fabric, also appealing to the citizen from the anti-narrative or democratic writing that disassembles the institutional and dominant discourse ruling nowadays’ society. For doing so, we thus examine some of the projects carried out by three artists belonging three different generations within the American Postmodern context. Martha Rosler, Janet Cardiff and Candy Chang, whose respective works, both claiming and subtle, focus on the urban subject, the memory of the place and the land’s poetics as a powerful tool for social transformation.