Abstract

This article explores the role of art interventions in mobilisations unleashed in Chile in October 2019, situating them in the urban fabric of one of the most segregated cities in the world: Santiago. Understood as an uprising against the precarity of life imposed by the neoliberal state, this social explosion devised creative and expressive strategies to disrupt the daily flow of ingrained normative structures, and questioned its longstanding legitimacy in shaping the city’s neoliberal layout. In this text, we first focus on the ways this spring of protest overflowed the genealogies that cross art, politics and public space on the local scene, opening up vanishing points between a certain tradition of politicisation of public art with solid roots in Latin American territory, on the one hand, and a more recent history of aestheticisation of urban protest that finds a crucial milestone in the playful resources of the student protests of 2011, on the other. From an interdisciplinary approach, we examine diverse art interventions that vindicated the urban space as a territory of public expression and political imagination to conceive a new constituent process. In this work, we sustain that these exercises reclaiming citizenship operated as ‘strategies of estrangement’, shedding light on how the neoliberal infrastructure of the city has naturalised inequality, social insecurity and segregation. By way of conclusion, we cross-examine the possibilities that aesthetic experience can offer for social and political resistance against neoliberal normalcy, and a common ground to explore alternative visions of futurity.