Daniela Fernanda Serna Jiménez

architect/urban designer, fellow Urban Design Studio, Columbia University (US)

And They Perform Places... Don't They

Keywords: space/place, urban, city-making, performance, life practice, memory, experiential process, developing country, semantics, real maravilloso.

If to consider the urban --as a rational play of forms-- is to be able to delineate a lifestyle of city dwelling --as transcendental, transgressive forms frames and interlaced in landscape--, then to refer to the urban is to dialectically involve urban space as it embraces the ordinary activity of life practice, performing in this dialogical exchange of propositions, the knowledge that the site generates in itself. (but) To do so is to engage in the ongoing debate of place/space within the urban discourse, one that substantiates, through a performance of cultural memory, the divergence between both. The urban as space/place is nevertheless practiced, collectively assembled as a dynamic organism that refuses stagnation, getting as space from the live world what only as place it produces, an entity that incessantly reconfigures under individual practices of the urban as unique processes of experience, recollection and disregard. But the progression of experiential build and decay as it unreservedly constitutes the urban figure, is nonetheless constrained under the notions of politics, economy and socio cultural drives, contributing to a much more critical construction of what performing places encircle.

What is it that makes a space a place: Performance. Immersed in the dialectics of the urban life practice, we city dwellers are participants of a much more subtle but nonetheless oppressive urban reform. As we become performers of places, we constitute with our daily metropolitan inhabitance the processes that delineate the places of the city as we assemble them together by our process of experiential build and decay, experiences, that connect us to a specific reality and affirm our people identity. We navigate the familiar urbanity thoroughly as we practice space as our own, following the contractual norms of role-play: citizenship. Thus life practice becomes no more than role-play, and the urban an assembly of conceptual settings (set designs) fitted to accommodate our civic profile. Such a disillusionment, means to become aware of the machinery directing us to perform our places.

Yet -as with every machinery- a disruption grounds to build on hope. An ironic cause and affect of the same political, economical and sociocultural drives that manage the performativity of the city. Those performatives or drives that masquerade as statements --but are neither verifiable nor nonsensical-- are performances tied to a kind of non-seriousness, a manifestation of marginal lives in and as some kind of "backstage artists" who would duplicate or reiterate the space as place-place putting 'the urban' in the inherent danger of doubled iterability. A contested collection of city dwellers that could not be fitted into the machinery, a group so neglected of masqueraded doubler structured urban space/place is the one that manages to configure the poetics of performing places, and constitute in the building that cultural memory. And so they are: a tragafuegos , a payaso , a vendedora de rosas and a malavarista ; a carterista , a fichera , and a teporocho ; and la indita , a limosnerito , a vagabundo , and el loquito . They take over the road intersections, under the bridges, and along the highways transforming the urbanity of the grandiose infrastructure of the transportation systems into an ever so magnificent stage. And they perform places. They carry on the individual process of experiential built and decay and fit it into a collective place making, enrolling us in their unique performance as we become 'blind' witnesses of the failure of the systematic civilian role-play and at the same time and most importantly, we stand a chance through their performance of constituting the place, a place of experience, recollection and disregard.

How can it be then, that to perform places accounts for both, a subversive remark of the "legitimate" policies of city-dwelling and a contested individual life practice of place-making that collectively constructs the urban? --And they perform places... don't they.    

Daniela Fernanda Serna Jimenez , native from Monterrey, N.L. México, is a licensed architect from the ITESM, and holds a Master degree in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University. Her academic training includes courses in, sculpture, drawing and painting, digital photography, acoustics, illumination and art design from various institutions including Université Laval in Quebec city, Parsons School of Design in New York city, and Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid. As a practice professional she has completed works in the fields or architecture, landscape, set design and graphic design, publishing several articles on architecture and theater critique in Mexican magazines o.bjeto and paso de gato . Her research cover topics in prehispanic and colonial architecture, performance and Mexican traditional events -Posadas, las Luminarias- and iconography of religion, faith and resistance -Guadalupe, Fidencismo and Huicholes- of the Northeastern México. She is currently a teaching fellow for the Urban Design Studio -the Water Studio- at Columbia University, and a practicing architect/urban designer.

Performance figures of the Mexican urban landscape. Trans. A fire spitter, a clown, a rose vendor, a juggler, a pickpocket, a working girl, a drunk and an indigenous woman, a young beggar, a vagabond and a lunatic.