Lights in the Riot. Audiovisual Interventions in the Public Space in Argentina 2000/2003

Abstract

The year 2000 marks the beginning of an expansion of audiovisual interventions in public space in Argentina, partly due to increased access to projection devices, but also driven by the socio-political and economic circumstances that mobilized artists, activists, and intellectuals to take to the streets. This essay delves into the interventions carried out between 2000 and 2003 in the City of Buenos Aires—a period during which one of the most significant uprisings in the country's political history occurred—and argues they acted as a means of social interaction and symbolic appropriation of public space for ideological, aesthetic, and countercultural purposes. It also analyzes how the political context stimulated or connected to key qualities of these situated practices: their creative processes—marked by strong collectivization—and their aesthetic qualities, resulting from a fervent state of political urgency.