Research Information System
RC21 Conference 2024, Santiago, Chile, 24 - 26 July 2024, (Summary Text)
The capitalist
economic system ensures its own continuity and existence by encouraging
individuals to consume non-stop. In this lifestyle, called the consumer
society, individuals are in a state of alienation. The research focuses on
examining and discussing the quality of street art in the context of urban
praxis, based on Hegel's emphasis on artistic production as a tool for
externalization and Lefebvre's pointing to the city and space in line with the
concept of praxis as a state of action presented by Marx as a method.
The research
aims to examine the concept of praxis through its artistic traces in the urban
space by placing production practices against the consumption practices of the
capitalist economic system from the perspective of the philosophy of space, and
mainly seeks to answer the question: Can the externalization of urban praxis be
evaluated through street art produced in urban space?
Against the
alienation caused by the atmosphere of consumption created by capitalism,
production practices are discussed in the context of praxis and this state of
production is evaluated through artistic production on the plane of urban
space. Artistic production is carried out by focusing on the graffiti (wall
painting and/or writing) dimension of street art as it is the traces of social
reflection in the city with its individual discourses.
In search of the
role of art and the artist in the context of urban praxis, this research is
approached with dialectics as a method. Accordingly, the research is designed
to evaluate four different anti-capitalist and socially engaged graffiti works
produced in urban space with four different conflicts from different
geographies of the Global North and Global South (Chile, Israel - Palestine,
France, Türkiye) in the context of urban praxis based on the four basic laws of
dialectics (integrity, movement, contradiction, revolution).