“Barricades, Blocks, and Borders: Lines of Division and Lines of Communication in Contested Urban Spaces”
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Todd Lowery
Drury University United States of America
tlowery@drury.edu
Author(s):
“Barricades, Blocks, and Borders:
Lines of Division and Lines of Communication in Contested Urban Spaces”
Todd Lowery
Professor of Art, Department of Fine and Performing Arts
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri, USA
tlowery@drury.edu
Barricades that repel and obstruct. Walls that surround and exclude. Cartographies with lines that divide and fragment. Graffiti and street art with lines that communicate and express. This contribution and body of work will investigate the visual relationships of barriers, boundaries, lines, and expressions based on observations and interpretations of spatial-cultural and socio-urban dynamics in three eastern Mediterranean contested urban spaces. The artwork is ultimately intended to serve as ‘experience maps’, interpreting pieces of, and moments in, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Nicosia.
While these three cities are often referred to, or imagined, as urban corpora that in earlier iterations existed as composite socio-urban structures, their (hi)stories betray pasts and presents of frequent and persistent divisions and fragmentations. Movement, flow, and communication, or lack thereof, of people, ideas and goods are constantly defined and redefined by numerous layers of seen and unseen barriers. The work will interpret these layers and lines that are comprised of natural and human-made structures and coexisting ambient information, with an attempt to connect and recreate experiential findings during fieldwork visits to the three cities.
This contribution and body of work intends to speak about lines: Lines that are drawn on maps, lines that are drawn in our minds and lines that are drawn on the ground. Lines that delineate, that differentiate, that exclude. Lines that form space and lines that form meaning. Lines that divide, segment and contain, but also lines that facilitate, communicate, and unite.
The interplay of crisis and art