From barbarism to memory: urban images as spaces of resilience

Abstract

In the years 1998, 2005 and 2017, three criminal deaths occurred in three spaces close to each other, in the South Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Three middle class youths were brutally murdered and won posthumous tributes, of a sculpture and two graffiti respectively. And in 2018 councilwoman Marielle Franco was murdered, giving rise to a similar social understanding and giving a new meaning to the place where the crime occurred, as well as many others, with artistic interventions. Such spaces and their surroundings, and so many others that punctuate Brazilian cities, could well be called the polygon of violence or the pain circuit, for portraying dead people. In view of this reality, the research presented here deals with an analytical reflection in the light of the concepts of “recollection” and “distraction” by Walter Benjamin, with the communication proposal of Vilém Flusser, also based on the poetics of Fernando Catroga's absence and the cultural studies on the memory of Aleida Assmann, as a proposal for the proper understanding of these practices of urban interventions as a phenomenon and its social function. Finally, the analyzes made it possible to infer that this form of resignification of suffering generates spaces of resilience, since they materialize the memory of the loss in the urban environment, by means of an artistic framework, portraying a last positive image of the deceased, so that other passersby see and be affected by the knowledge of their names and their stories.