Performance, writting, and public space in the construction of the democratic city

Abstract

This article explores some urban resignification strategies developed by artists and experimental poets in the last years of the Franco´s regime. From this perspective, we are interested in studying how —in the context of the late Francoism—, some artists, through different proposals in which performance, factographic practices or experimental writing are intertwined, generated a series of works that tried to make visible the repressive dimension of public space, controlled by the State. At the same time, these practices produced new dispositifs designed to recover the city through uses that could be described as democratic. These initiatives succeeded in producing practices that allowed to think of new spaces of freedom to satisfy the needs of individuals in an integral way. The city of Madrid was one of the main stages of action of these artists, battlefield against the normalization of the behaviors and social relations of its inhabitants.