Threads and webs of everyday life in the labyrinth of urban experience

Abstract

Based on a research carried out in Aracaju, this text focuses on the relations between urban experience and the constitution of subjectivation modes in the present, especially at the Old Bus Station in the city centre. The article reflects on city small talks as an insistent everyday practice that intertwines the urban experience. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's conceptions, the research proposed "wanderings" through the city – as a production of rhythmic differences in relation to the utilitarian acceleration imposed by contemporary capitalism – to accompany the weaving of everyday practices. Some images of the city are presented to show the small talk production, articulated to everyday life concept, addressing the dimension of the labyrinth as a constitutive feature of urban experience. The article proposes similarities between the small talk labyrinth in the city and Arthur Bispo do Rosário works, who invented labyrinths intersecting disused objects, words, affections and fragments of life that were displaced and reassembled amid the asylum torture. Both in the labyrinth of urban experience engendered by small talk and in the work-labyrinth of the manicomialised black artist, times and spaces are woven, altered and bifurcated in gestures that, in disparate ways, refuse the confinement of the present.