Obervations
Notes on anonymous symbols and marks in the lost city.
Notes on Anonymous Symbols and Marks in the Lost City
It is well known that symbols are graphic representations that help us communicate ideas, moods, dreams, and political discontent. Gradually, they cover public spaces, competing with the world of advertising for the attention of passersby.
The great transformations that cities have undergone in recent decades are evident. Initially, efforts focused on regenerating urban spaces, with interventions in streets and squares, equipping the entire city, especially in peripheral areas where there were serious urban deficits, and prioritizing urban projects. The construction of housing complexes, roads, bridges, and industrial zones has often taken on a chaotic, unaesthetic, and inhumane form. The city has lost its capacity to attract, its eroticism, its ability to fascinate and to serve as a place of thought. It is crucial to emphasize that the construction of the city should not be left solely to politicians, real estate speculators, and technocrats, but must essentially involve the participation of its citizens.
As a political concept, public space speaks to us of a sphere of peaceful and harmonious coexistence among the heterogeneous elements of society, a framework in which the possibility of living democratically and as equals is assumed and reaffirmed. The public sphere is, in political terms, a construct in which each human being is recognized in relation to others, with whom they connect through reflective agreements that are continuously renewed.
Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, notes:
“What is the city to us today? Perhaps we are approaching a moment of crisis in urban life, and the infinite cities are a dream born from the heart of the invisible cities. Today, we hear the same insistence on both the destruction of the natural environment and the fragility of large technological systems that can cause chain damages, paralyzing entire metropolises. The crisis of the overly large city is the other side of the crisis of nature. The image of the ‘megalopolis,’ the continuous, uniform city that is covering the world. What matters is to discover the secret reasons that have led people to live in cities. Cities are a set of many things: memories, desires, signs of a language; they are places of exchange, as all history books on economics explain, but these exchanges are not only of goods, they are also exchanges of words, desires, memories.”
Patricio Salinas A
