How can practices of reenchantment in urban spaces create space for imagination away from a productive categorisation-based urbanism subverting current power dynamics?

In São Paulo the civil construction never stopped during the pandemic. While other forms of work were adapted to online formats and rethought, the so-called empty streets remained used by civil construction workers, street cleaners and delivery carriers, sustaining a feeling of normality in the midst of crisis. In the current uban narrative, construction and maintenance are seen as drivers of development and growth, and the focus of a successful city. 

Street Incantations is a research project which questions power dynamics in urban spaces, aiming at shifting the focus on built environments to the appropriation and narratives created by actual bodies which temporarily inhabit spaces and summoning desires to occupy and reimagine places through a series of urban interventions and a WhatsApp-based play.

By making use of magic realism and technological spheres, as well as tactics of enchantment – such as the creation of totems, divinations and the use of archetypes – the project seeks to intertwine factual stories about a street in São Paulo and the workers responsible for sustaining it, with fictional characters that exist only on the screen of the viewer, with the aim of creating a dissonance between what is seen, what is real and what is imagined. 

How far do power structures and urban narratives control how we perceive a space and what we believe we are able to do in this space? Are we able to reimagine our roles in such spaces? Can something as ephemeral as a walk through a street have the same value as a huge construction site? Who defines what is essential work? 

The work is a constantly evolving process, which plays with the relationship between actual physical interventions, autobiographical narratives, identity and collective storytelling. As a play, it requires active engagement, and constantly builds on participants’ responses. As a site-specific work, it creates new networks and connections between the people that remain in an ever-shifting landscape, and subtly contributes to this environment. And as an enchantment, it summons new spirits into a secular space.