Abstract

Urban Negotiations are art strategies that find possibilities for art to engage in real life issues. Nomadic Kitchen is an interstitial art initiative that occupies a place between art and urban space. This work engages with issues of self-organisation, in the process negotiating the urban environment with the residents of Vila Nova, a favela community in Sao Miguel, Brazil. Nomadic Kitchen is one urban practice among many in a collaborative and participatory action in the production of public and private space. The emergent strategies for this artwork evolved through a series of workshops with residents of Vila Nova. The working strategy created a place of agency between participants. The project embraces ‘informality’ as another kind of intelligence whose tactics bring a collective visibility to the project and other kinds of urban negotiations. The structure will function as a locus where residents self govern and develop flexible and creative ways of building a context for living. The structure of Nomadic Kitchen is flexible, fluid, nomadic and adaptable to different occasions and contexts of informal urban practices. Urban decisions around producing public and social space are made while cooking, eating and meeting in the Nomadic Kitchen. This interstitial sculptural structure becomes a place of dialogue while defining the conditions that determine its situated conditions and public space. The consequences of Nomadic Kitchen explore the potential limits of art production as an urgent action in creating an aesthetic-ethical-spatial- politics.

How to Cite:

O’Kelly, M., (2009) “Urban Negotiations – Nomadic Kitchen and Strategies of Practice”, field 3(1), 75–94.