Lembrar é re-existir: uma experiência anarquista de intervenções urbanas no Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Increasingly the city of Rio de Janeiro is managed by authoritarian urban policies, which limit any participation. Recently, however, we have seen the use of the urban as a form of resistance of deconstruction of political paradigms by social movements. This essay intends to discuss the work carried out by NexA - Nucleus of Anarchist Experimentations that looks to question the current urban context through direct interventions in the urban space. Here we look to discuss the perceptions and discussions of this group and their urban interventions in Rio de Janeiro; specifically the intervention called To Remember is to Re-exist, where the group puts signs where those killed or disappeared during the dictatorship were last seen. Issues such as the process of the creation of truths and the debate concerning the institutionalisation of this type of activity. Finally, we will discuss how this type of intervention, related to repression and resistance of the past, based on the groups ideas of pleasure, freedom and artivism (a word which plays with the words art and activism), can also have an impact on the city that currently seems to be administrated by business style management with policies and planning that produce increasingly less real public urban spaces, instead a city which favours the financial sphere and private capital.