Espectro del cuerpo urbano

collaborative action, temporary mural
“La candela se prendió”, Caracas, 2022

The elevated sidewalks of Caracas are the result of the adaptation of the city’s urban design to motor vehicle traffic in the first two decades of the 20th century, when the irregular dirt roads of the capital’s original grid were leveled with pavement, bridges and embankments, leaving the houses at different heights, some of them on top of sidewalks-walls crowned by railings and accessible (for some bodies) only by means of stairs.

One of those avenues is East 5 of La Candelaria Norte, a sector chosen by the organizers of La Candela to carry out a collective artistic takeover for “the rescue” of public space, nightlife and commerce” in the parish.

To intervene in public space without permits and without leaving a permanent trace, I had the idea of ‘occupying’ a traffic sidewalk that was impossible for my physicality and mobility as an electric wheelchair user with a series of traced silhouettes of my figure drawn in chalk on the side of the raised sidewalk in question. My successive silhouettes occupied the available space in different degrees of completion. With a total of 24 silhouettes, I had enough to compose a second of stop-motion animation with the standard framerate of 24 frames per second that generates the scrolling impression of my ‘spectre’ on the side of the sidewalk. The word spectrum refers here not only to the kind of urban ghost that people with reduced mobility are in city planning but also to the idea that human corporality is a spectrum that should not be understood in binary terms as healthy. /sick, normal/abnormal, able/disabled.