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The text explores the notion of urban atmosphere, its ordinary rhythm, and the debilitating effects that it might have on the bodies that breathe through it, by looking at Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s third movie, and first international success, Uzak [2002]. In the first two sections, the theoretical background is laid out, both presenting a ‘tensional’ concept of atmosphere and proposing the employment of the notion of ‘ordinary’ as a way to explore how atmospheres unfold in everyday life. How can we attune to the fleeting consistency of the ordinary, however? The third section makes an argument for the capacity of cinema to do so, mainly drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Lauren Berlant. In the subsequent sections, Uzak is explored by showing how these themes are brought forward through the slow-paced aesthetics of the film.

The liquid reality of the urban has been often explored in the field of urban political ecology, which has considered the ways in which the city is actually stitched together or pulled apart by the physical flows of liquids, the submerged city made of pipes, tubes and sewers, a hidden network in which the drinkable and the wasted liquids intersect and flow asymmetrically. Many of these works have been crucial in embedding water in socio-political relations. However, often at the cost of reducing water to said relations, falling short of attending to water’s agentic capacity, failing to consider the encounter between those socio-political relations and the materiality of the liquid itself.Usually framed through questions of power, inequality, consumption and cultural meaning, rarely these studies have engaged with the materiality and agency of urban liquids and, most crucially, with their essential capacity to overflow. In this propositional piece, we ask the question: what does it mean to think the city through its overflows?

Ai Weiwei’s art installation Kui Hua Zi [Sunflower Seeds] took place between 2010 and 2011 in the gigantic Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern Gallery, in London. It consisted of 100 millions hand-crafted porcelain seeds made in Jingdezhen, China.1 An uneven surface to dive into, a haptic space of undulating vision, rustling steps, unusual horizontality, a meaningless quicksand where the separation between artwork and spectator is engulfed, the immunity of distant contemplation denied.

Beyond use, exchange and sign value, current marketing practices have consistently turned on notions of contextual fruition, experience, performativity, affective spaces, atmospheres. The logic of the experience economy has quickly spilled over other realms: architecture and design, security and control, urban planning and law. As the language of brand overflows the marketing jargon to apply to urban events1 and renewal projects, the notion of brandscape becomes increasingly relevant to indicate the institutional engineering of material and immaterial, visible and invisible spaces. Brandscaping is a “more or less successful institutional attempt to inscribe spaces and their inhabitants in their own terms” (Ball and Wood, 2008), in other words, to freeze space, to capture and tame its multiplicity, to make it static, organised, predictable, not in the cumbersome, panoptical way, but rather through affective strategies, by producing, managing and securing “atmospherically enriched experiences” (Klingmann, 2007: 6).

No abstract available.

Abstract This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. This is done in three steps. First, via a perambulating immersion into the complexity of a specific site. Second, via a critical engagement with the form and politics of contemporary street art. Third, via a strategic speculation on the relation between the notions of art, urban and site. Street art’s current impasse, I argue, paradoxically depends on its incapacity to become properly urban. A urban-specific street art, I contend, is not a decorative veneer nor an enchanting disruption to dramatic processes of urbanisation: it is a force-field in which these processes are made visible, experienceable, and thus called into question. The ‘Olympic’ works of JR and Kobra in Rio de Janeiro, and the iconoclastic performance by Blu in Berlin, are used to illustrate and complement the argument.

Copyright of Mondo Ortodontico is the property of Masson SPA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mondo Ortodontico is the property of Masson SPA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mondo Ortodontico is the property of Masson SPA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mondo Ortodontico is the property of Masson SPA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mondo Ortodontico is the property of Masson SPA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)