Apocalyptic urban surrealism in the city at the end of the world

Wilson, Japhy

doi:10.1177/00420980221118817

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…28 But while this literature draws attention to the interest of the early surrealists in the magical and enchanted, it overlooks the surrealist concern with the absurd, which Salvador Dalí regarded as 'a kind of fount of truths'. 29 In contrast to the oneiric romanticism of the initial surrealist project, 30 Dalí embraced the absurd in his attempts 'to systematise confusion and thereby contribute to a total discrediting of the world of reality'. 31 Dalí's absurdist strain of surrealism was a profound inspiration for the surrealist author J.G.…”

Section: Toward An Absurdist Geography Of the Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

Space out of joint: absurdist geographies of the Anthropocene

Wilson

2022

cultural geographies

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This paper seeks to demonstrate the critical utility of the concept of the absurd in the exploration of the combined and uneven apocalypse known as the Anthropocene. Drawing inspiration from absurdist literature, and based on extensive field research, it takes the form of a psychogeographical journey down a non-existent highway in the Peruvian Amazon. The route of this long-promised megaproject is inhabited by people adrift in the midst of meaningless ruins, haunted by spectral infrastructures that were promised but never came, and plagued by monstrous apparitions of extractive violence. Consistent with absurdist method, the paper resists the temptation to leap out of this disconcerting domain into the normalizing rituals of academic sensemaking, and aims instead to grasp and convey the disorienting lived experience of ‘space out of joint’. In doing so, it suggests that an absurdist sensibility can contribute to current debates in cultural geography on spectrality, psychogeography, and creative writing, through its emphasis on irrationality and indeterminacy, its exploration of chaotic and disintegrating spaces, and its evocation of fragmentation and disjuncture in the form of jagged shards of stark and vivid prose.

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Section: Toward An Absurdist Geography Of the Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

Space out of joint: absurdist geographies of the Anthropocene

Wilson

2022

cultural geographies

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“…Hewitt and Graham, 2015; Parker, 2018), as well as that which uses literary authors and theorists as part of a disruptive methodology in the analysis of actual city spaces (e.g. Wilson, 2023). Recent work in spatial literary studies and literary urban studies, for example, demonstrates how understanding the operation of storytelling and narrative in general can cast new light on projections of urban futures (Finch, 2016; Lanigan, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public transport as public space: Introduction

Tuvikene,

Sgibnev,

Kȩbłowski

et al. 2023

Urban Studies

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Introducing this special issue on public transport as public space, we discuss challenges in approaching public transport as public space and outline how incorporating approaches from different disciplines associated with urban studies is essential for this ambition. We offer an account of the multi-dimensional aspects of public transport as public space, including concepts of public space, questions of encounters and conviviality, linkages between micro- and macro-practices, regulations, discrepancies, conflicts and associated negative encounters, historicised experiences and political perspectives. We stress the need to expand existing perspectives on public space by embracing mobile spaces such as public transport. This entails scrutinising spaces inside public transport vehicles and stations as well as analysing the various ways across the sometimes physical and sometimes invisible barriers defined in written rules, separating public transport space from the remainder of the city’s public spaces, notably that of the street. Thus, the special issue: explores questions about the spatiality of publicness; attends to public space as a normative ideal; considers critical aspects of passengering as related to conviviality and contested encounters; and, addresses how the publicness of public transport is affected by modernisation, post-colonialism and urban politics. As we strongly feel that these questions require learning from across disciplines, the special issue includes contributions from diverse fields across the realm of urban studies and humanities alike.

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The Rotting City: Surrealist Arts of Noticing the Urban Anthropocene

Wilson

2023

Space and Culture

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This article develops a surrealist approach to researching and writing about the urban Anthropocene, as a critical contribution to existing literatures on “arts of noticing” and “staying with the trouble.” Drawing on psychogeographical explorations of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon and distancing itself from conventional modes of academic writing, the article presents a montage of surrealist images of this (post)apocalyptic metropolis. Iquitos emerges as a palimpsest of the wreckage of repeated resource booms, strewn with the ruins of a stillborn modernity and incubating an uncanny fusion of apocalyptic and utopian elements observable in the everyday practices of its subaltern inhabitants. Just as Paris was the capital of the 19th century for Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, so the interpretation of Iquitos as an extreme metaphor for our combined and uneven apocalypse designates it as the capital of the Anthropocene.

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Apocalyptic urban surrealism in the city at the end of the world

Cited by 4 publications

References 18 publications

Space out of joint: absurdist geographies of the Anthropocene

Space out of joint: absurdist geographies of the Anthropocene

Public transport as public space: Introduction

The Rotting City: Surrealist Arts of Noticing the Urban Anthropocene

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