2021/12/06 by Meike Schmitz, Schmitz, Meike
Social Sciences · #Latin American Urban Studies #Latin American and Latino Studies #Public Spaces through Art #aesthetics of resistance #feminized city #performance #urban space
paper · doi:10.23692/imex.6.7
openalex publication_date 2021/12/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
pp. 76-102. The public urban space of the Mexican metropolis is a contested space. Especially in the historic center, different interests clash: On the one hand there are the homogenizing tendencies of gentrification, the official imaginary of a clean, attractive and global city. On the other hand, we have numerous informal interventions that also shape and produce public space. Different actors appropriate this public space, overwrite it with their own imaginary and thus generate an alternative aesthetic, an aesthetic of resistance. This article analyzes artistic intervention in urban space as part of this aesthetic of resistance. Art in public space has the capacity to oppose the official imaginary of the city, the capacity to draw symbolic spaces on social reality and thus produce an alternative imaginary. This is what the action Monumenta, carried out in 2007 by seven Mexican artists and the central object of analysis of this article, tries to achieve. To an urban reality received as predominantly masculine, the artists oppose their utopia of a feminized city. The point of attack they choose are the monuments along the Paseo de la Reforma that represent the official history of the city and the nation. Starting from a feminist position, the artists transform the "city of monuments" into "the city of monumentas"; their means is the appropriation of space through artistic intervention.