The materiality of light: Luminic artivism, public space & poetic politics in Santiago

There is a square in Santiago where, from time to time and in unexpected ways, it is possible to see politics in play. Seeing here is literal, not only because the square is the traditional place where demonstrations take place in the city, or because it congregated the most massive demonstrations in the history of the country in October 2019, but because there, in the buildings surrounding Plaza Italia, several luminic projections have taken place voicing through light contingent controversies of the Chilean socio-political situation. The artistic collective working with these projections uses light as artistic material. In this presentation I want to explore the materiality of light both as something that gives form to public space and as an aesthetization of collective action for social justice. Regarding the former objective, light as something that gives form to public space, I argue this type of artivism with light is able to create different definitions of space as public at the same time that it gives different publics a space in the city landscape. Regarding the second objective, the aesthetization of collective action, I intend to use a series of images from the luminic artivism conducted by the Chilean collective DelightLab, to explore the connection between politics and poetry as a necessary way to unsettle conventional understandings of what democratic politics is, and more importantly, what it could be(come).

Daniela Vicherat Mattar (PhD European University Institute) convenes the Culture, History and Society major. Trained as a sociologist, her research focuses on cities, citizenship and, more recently, care. She’s interested in how dominant ideas about belonging translate in urban forms and infrastructures (like walls, public squares, markets, museums) and through urban aesthetics (graffiti and street art) in Europe and Latin America. Her portfolio at LUC is on the inter- and cross- disciplinary aspects of the curriculum, where her interest is to further explore the limits of disciplinary knowledge and teaching in relation to today’s global challenges. Recently Daniela has been awarded a Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) grant for an inter-faculty project titled ‘The many faces of food markets during COVID-19: Stories of solidarity and change through and with food’.

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/daniela-vicherat-mattar#tab-1

Date:
28 June 2023
17:45-19:15

Venue:
Seminarraum S 253,
Classen-Kappelmannstr. 24
50931 Köln