Activist Screen Projection Art in the Gentrifying Neighborhood

Most studies on the relation between activist public art and neoliberal urbanization rely on an unambiguous understanding of the aesthetic dimension of gentrification, against which they measure to what extent an artistic intervention can be declared complicit or resistant. The aesthetics of gentrification—how it molds into shapes, colors and sounds as it takes over a neighborhood—and the potential of dissident art to perpetuate this aesthetic, are conventionally appraised by their figurative proximity to the violent logics of profit and ideological forces that drive the displacement of local communities. Assessments of public art’s culpability or moral integrity in this respect inevitably fall into the value-laden dichotomy between the sinful gentrifying agent and the subjugated gentrified community, ‘bad’ top-down gentrifying art and ‘good’ bottom-up resistance art. Even meticulous analyses of self-reflexive anti-gentrification art practices that problematize their position vis-à-vis their spatial context ultimately operate through the same binary thinking.

I argue that investigating dissident art in the contemporary neoliberal city through preconceived categories might be reducing our ability to penetrate the complexity of the phenomenon. Research that takes the “the perspective of artistic resistance” fails to properly acknowledge the agency of individuals in responding to activist art and generating its meaning.¹Tijen Tunalı, “Introduction: The Dialectic Role of Art in Late Neoliberal Urbanism,” in Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape, ed. Tijen Tunalı (London: Routledge, 2021), 3. Understanding the categories of ‘locals’ or ‘residents’ as unanimous voices does not allow nuances of diverging receptions within the same community to emerge. To overcome these limitations, I advocate for an approach to the study of gentrification’s aesthetic and architectural markers that acknowledges these as emerging phenomena rather than given spatial elements. As Gernot Böhme puts it, the experience of the qualities, character and atmosphere of a space depend on “how one senses these qualities in one’s own disposition”.²Gernot Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, trans. Anna Christina Engels-Schwarzpaul (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 76-78. Which spatial qualities, I ask, and which dispositions produce the experience of gentrification in a transforming lower-income neighborhood when activist art is displayed? To answer these questions, we must study the relation between resistance art and gentrification through the eyes of the recipients.

This article draws on my 2021 thesis about the spatial effects of activist projection art in contested urban sites. I carried out my ethnography around the screen projections of Til Vægs, a grassroots art and activism platform based in an infamous public housing complex, Lundtoftegade, in Copenhagen’s trendy and historically working-class neighborhood of Nørrebro. Through semi-structured and on-the-spot interviews, participatory observation, document analysis, and digital ethnography, I investigated people’s responses to activist projection art in order to understand what this practice does to the place where it is displayed, and how it can participate simultaneously in the production of resistance and gentrified space. In this article, I zoom in on the processes—phenomenological and epistemological—by which the logic and aesthetics of gentrification are reproduced through experiences of screen projection art. Paying attention to the materiality of screen projection and to what Luke Carroll calls the “production of gentrifying subjects”, I focus on the semiotic relations between art projections, the architecture surrounding them, and the subjective perceptions that give birth to the aesthetic experience of gentrification.³Luke Carroll, “Gentrification and the Critique of the Contemporary Urban Dream-World,” in Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape, ed. Christoph Lindner and Gerard F. Sandoval (London: Routledge, 2021), 24. Hence, I explain gentrification as the heterogeneous result of a plurality of embodied processes, strongly intertwined with the assumptions and values of the subjects that criticize yet reify its aesthetic dimension.

Shifting Representations of Social Housing in Screen Projection Art

Through a program of temporary exhibitions, Til Vægs invites Danish and international artists to create site-specific visual works — still or moving images — displayed on seven outdoor screens across Lundtoftegade’s public housing estate, for residents, visitors, and passersby to enjoy. The exhibitions mostly address issues such as tenant democracy (beboerdemokrati), gentrification, the urban commons, race, technology, and eco-social feminism. The project itself evolved from what once was the social housing’s “arts club”. As such, it represents a meeting point for residents interested or engaged in arts and politics. Over the years, alongside screen projection art, Til Vægs’s activities have included participatory performances, art parades and demonstrations, poster and sticker campaigns, community work, petitions, communal gardening, film screenings, and lectures.

In the tradition of public art, Til Vægs’s work aligns with the struggle for the right to the city, specifically with the broader resistance movement opposing Denmark’s neoliberal urban policies. Since 2010, the Danish government has published a yearly list designating social housing areas that do not meet required standards of employment, education, and income, and which exceed the cap on crime rates and percentage of tenants from a “non-Western background”. Formerly known as “ghetto laws”, these discriminatory policies aim to “reintegrate” targeted areas by rejecting applicants, evicting residents, and ultimately expropriating, demolishing or privatizing their homes.⁴“Udsatte Boligområder,” BL, bl.dk/viden-kartotek/udsatte-boligomraader/, accessed February 12, 2025. Policies about “vulnerable residential areas” have caused a great amount of controversy in Danish public debate and consequent activist mobilization. The Danish government has been subject to lawsuits by social housing residents, UN Human Rights Council investigations, and is now attending a ruling by the EU Court of Justice. Recommended resources: activist organization Almen Modstand, www.almenmodstand.dk.; United Nations OHCHR press release, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/10/un-human-rights-experts-urge-denmark-halt-contentious-sale-ghetto-buildings.

This political attack on non-white, majority Muslim, and welfare-assisted communities has threatened Lundtoftegade since 2017. As a response, Søren-Emil Schütt, a leading resident and housing activist, and Mette Nisgaard, a visual artist and social worker, decided to explore the possibility of displaying public art in this area, which is often portrayed as “criminal” and “underdeveloped” in mainstream Danish media and political discourse.⁵Mette Nisgaard, interview by Pauline Joelle Panetta, February 2021. This action was motivated by their confidence in public art’s potential to open room for imaginative thinking and foster reflection about topical sociopolitical questions, but also in its ability to beautify the estate and create spaces for conviviality.⁶Søren-Emil Schütt, interview by Pauline Joelle Panetta, January 2021.

The core aim of Til Vægs is to encourage a “soft focus-shift” in the public’s perception of Lundtoftegade, defying the cliché of subsidized residents as criminal, uncultured, and uninterested in or incapable of appreciating high-quality artistic political statements.⁷Ibid. While lower-income neighborhoods are typically associated with DIY or community art projects, screen projection art is meant to subvert viewers’ expectations about the types of artistic expressions that can be found in social housing. In the words of an elderly retiree who has lived in the housing complex for over three decades, the projections have shed a new light on Lundtoftegade:

The art is there to make it visible for people who come visit… It must have a purpose: it draws attention to the area and shows that art is a matter for this community. It makes it interesting to look at this area, it makes it more like: it’s not a ghetto anymore, it’s a place where you can deal with art and social matters. It shows something different from what we might expect from this area, it gives a different image compared to what it was many years ago.⁸Anonymous, interview by Pauline Joelle Panetta, March 2021.

The operation of projection art consists in overlaying an existing place with a new signifier. It enacts its sociopolitical critique by inciting viewers to question the values and ideological systems represented by the architecture on which it is displayed, which are often accepted uncritically in the everyday experience of urban space. By displaying art against the backdrop of the colossal social housing estate, which functions as a “site-based metonymy” for the community living inside it, Til Vægs’s exhibitions challenge the normative sphere of meaning attributed to social housing, and enter into dialogue with the neoliberal urban legislation that affects social housing across Denmark.⁹Andy Buchanan, “Projection Art and Projection Activism,” Architecture_MPS 20, no. 1 (2021): 7, https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v20i1.001.

From my interviewee’s perspective, the juxtaposition of projection art—which signifies cultural engagement and sociopolitical reflection—onto the defamed buildings has contributed to abating stigma against Lundtoftegade:

This social housing was characterized by the newspaper as a dull thing, but it has got a lift throughout the years, during two main modernizing projects…Now, it has got another image using this example of [artistic] expression. It gives this so-called ‘ghetto’ another image. It’s not only social apartments, it has different aspects: there are so many interests and leisure activities, different interests as well as art. I think it is a good idea to show another kind of function of this area.¹⁰Anonymous, interview with the author.

Til Vægs “treats the public space, social representation or artistic language in which [it] intervenes as both a target and a weapon”, as Hal Foster wrote with regard to provocative postmodern artists.¹¹Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1987), 100. By putting forward an alternative representation of Lundtoftegade into the public sphere, the screen projections contest the hegemonic “regimes of place” that prescribe the dogmatic function and meaning of social housing.¹²Kurt Iveson, Publics and the City (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 39. The elderly resident takes pride in this novel representation, believing that it improves the public’s perspective on Lundtoftegade against the dominant discourse about it.

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Screen Projection Art and Repressed Cultural Gentrification

Of course, everything you put up [on the walls] is something for the people. Everything you make for the people feels good, you can see it, you can like it, you can, whatever… I’m not looking at the screen all the time, but sometimes I come here and look at it. You see people walking by and coming up to the screens and looking at it … Sometimes they are very good pictures, sometimes they are about people living here, sometimes I don’t recognize them… Sometimes we like, sometimes we don’t like, everybody have their meanings.¹³Morten, interview by Pauline Joelle Panetta, March 2021.

Morten is a 58 year-old subsidized tenant who spends much of his free time lounging on Lundtoftegade’s benches, drinking beer by Til Vægs’s displays. His words speak to projection art’s capacity to animate the building and highlight the subjective nature of public art’s reception. Because activist projection formulates its message through the semiotic manipulation of architecture, language, imagery, and ideological codes, spectators produce its meaning, according to their individual understanding of the signs that are being manipulated.(Justyna Wierzchowska, “Performing the Return of the Repressed: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Artistic Interventions in New York City’s Public Space,” European Journal of American Studies 10, no. 3 (December 31, 2015): 3, https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11308.)) Once projection art is put into the public sphere, it exposes itself to a multiplicity of interpretations, over which the creator loses control.

A case in point is the response from an interviewee, Line, a 32-year-old designer living in one of the polished cooperative buildings opposite Lundtoftegade’s public housing. I met her as I walked by a screen projecting an illustration by cartoonist Halfdan Pisket — himself the son of an immigrant father, raised in social housing and close to Nørrebro’s activist scene. In the exhibition produced for Til Vægs, entitled Paranoia, Pisket draws from his personal experience to portray everyday life in a neighborhood affected by the “ghetto laws”, harsh police surveillance, and stigmatization from the outside world. His illustrations address the feeling of being the object of the scrutinizing gaze of law enforcement, the media, politicians, and bourgeois society.¹⁴“Projects: Halfdan Pisket,” Til Vægs, tilvaegs.com/projekt/paranoia, accessed February 10, 2025. Line had heard about Pisket from some friends, and was staring at the screen with suspicion. When I struck up conversation, she began a vehement argumentation against the racist implications of the ‘ghetto laws’ and the harms of Nørrebro’s gentrification for minority communities. The distress caused by the projection was palpable in her voice:

Seems like they’re trying to make it more ‘hip and cool’ for the other people, for them to move into the neighborhood. I think it’s controversial in an area that is very politically charged. You know, the typical thing: oh, let’s put the cool artsy thing on the disadvantaged block building ‘cause it’s cooI! I can imagine seeing this in Berlin or somewhere else, in any other big city, in neighborhoods like this. I mean, I don’t understand the meaning of Pisket’s drawings in this area, it is not telling anything about this place… it has nothing to do with an area like this, it doesn’t involve the people from the community! There are a lot of young people with social problems living here, from migrant backgrounds… If it was some art made by the people from here, well then maybe… But it’s very disrespectful to have this art imposed from the outside (italics added)!¹⁵Line, interview by Pauline Joelle Panetta, March 2021.

In Line’s condemnatory reading, rather than contesting demeaning stereotypes about social housing, projection art figures as a stereotypical manifestation of the broader phenomenon of top-down “regeneration” that bears on disenfranchised neighborhoods across many cities. This representation of gentrified space, well-established in Line’s imaginary, is produced through the semiotic contraposition between the screen projections, perceived as “artsy”, “hip”, “sophisticated”, and Lundtoftegade, seen as “disadvantaged” and “vulnerable”. The aesthetic and semantic incompatibility of projection art with public housing generates the feeling of dissonance: in her understanding, the screen projection cannot belong to a lower-income neighborhood, hence it must be forced upon it. Til Vægs is thereby accused of enacting what Jonathan Crisman has termed “cultural gentrification”: the effects of an intervention that breaks with the history and identity of a place, compromising the sense of belonging of the community that has traditionally inhabited it.¹⁶Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, “Art and the Aesthetics of Cultural Gentrification: The Cases of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles,” in Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City, ed. Christoph Lindner and Gerard F. Sandoval (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 142–43. Line contrasts the “outsider” screen art against “inside” artforms, explicitly produced by residents or semantically associated with them (DIY, participatory, community-based, charitable), which would not feel imposed, unbefitting, and gentrifying.¹⁷Crisman, 138. Regardless of the fact that Paranoia is conceived as resistance art for and about Lundtoftegade’s residents, the incongruity between the medium of screen projection and the observer’s conception of social housing conceals the relation between the artwork and the site of display, making cultural gentrification perceptible. Hence, resistance projection art acquires its gentrifying property through its perceived discontinuity with the semantic sphere of social housing, suggesting that the aesthetic experience of gentrified space implies the experience of some level of aesthetic dissonance.

It is clear that Line’s encounter with the projections did not set in motion the cascade of semiotic connections that ought to be in place for the intended meaning of Pisket’s work to come to the fore. The screen projections confirm her expectations about the aesthetics of a gentrifying neighborhood, but conflict with her assumptions about social housing. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, Justyna Wierzchowska argues that one limitation of projection art that attempts to subvert the dominant significations of a site/object is exactly that it requires spectators to question their own understanding of that site/object, and the broader system of beliefs that informs such understanding. When this implies disrupting a sedimented worldview, spectators tend to resist change. Rather than dealing with the discomfort of contradicting one’s own self-identity, people tend to strive for internal coherence by upholding their judgements and repressing that which opposes them.¹⁸Wierzchowska, “Performing the Return of the Repressed,” 9. This limitation applies to Til Vægs’s activist projections as well. Their presence at Lundtoftegade is incompatible with Line’s belief that social housing tenants, and especially the youth of migrant background, are too destitute to be interested, appreciative or participative in an art project of this sort. This incongruence disquiets her, causing perplexity and unease. Instead of revising her assumptions about social housing residents, she seems to resolve this internal contradiction by concluding that the art intervention must be planted in that location by an extrinsic actor, violently disrupting the place-identity of the housing block at the expense of residents. In her critique of Til Vægs’s projections, “what is repressed in the hegemonic discourse translates into one’s own repressions”: her apprehension for residents’ reception of projection art (un)veils her prejudiced attitude towards social housing, unwittingly reproducing the oppressive stigmatization and the inequitable power dynamics inherent to gentrification that she thinks she is condemning.¹⁹Wierzchowska, “Performing the Return of the Repressed,” 9. Concurrently, her repressive criticism allows her to sustain a self-image of liberal, politically conscious and socially minded urban youth.

Screen Projection Art and the Consumption of Authenticity

Another interviewee wary about projection art’s gentrifying potential is Mark, a 22-year-old resident of the housing estate. I met him on a cold winter evening; he was sitting on a bench by a screen, on the backside of the northern building, smoking a joint, as he commonly does at the end of his work shift. Mark is not particularly passionate about art and does not pay much attention to the screen projections, but after giving a second look to Pisket’s projection, he said:

I’m into this kind of ‘psychedelic art’…I like this new wave digital art, for example tv, screens, I think it’s cool… But also… I think it’s gentrification. It takes away from the authenticity of a working-class neighborhood like Nørrebro. It makes it more middle class, like the big tall building there that made all the housing prices go up.²⁰Mark, interview by Pauline Joelle Panetta, March 2021.

Mark pointed towards the 29-storey student accommodation built alongside a now-remodeled and half-privatized social housing project, not far from Lundtoftegade, which dominates Nørrebro’s skyline (fig. 7). He cites this amongst the controversial transformations happening in the area that make him feel that his neighborhood is not what it once was: the renovation of the nearby Mimersplads and Nørrebroparken, the opening of the new metro station, the proliferation of expensive cafes, the construction of modern buildings.

MARK: So in part [the screen art] fits the original neighborhood, I really like it, but in part it also gentrifies. I don’t know, it’s a paradox! You also have graffiti and street art and that is part of the vibe of the neighborhood. It’s not gentrification.

PAULINE: So what makes this installation different?

MARK: It’s nice, it fits the vibe, it has some of that because it’s still street art. But it also symbolizes gentrification somehow… I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. It’s the vibe. It’s so avant-garde. I think if it was more handmade, handcraft, DIY, it would look different, it would fit more. Instead the screens and the visual art looks very modern.

PAULINE: Is this what makes you think of gentrification?

MARK: Well, it also depends on the artist. If the artist was from a family from a wealthy household and the parents bought him an apartment in Nørrebro and he started making art and this (points to screen)—then fuck off.²¹Mark, interview by Pauline Joelle Panetta, March 2021.

Mark’s sociopolitical critique of neoliberal urban transformation flows out from an attempt to verbalize the incoherent impression felt before the screen projection, the immediate “embodied experience” through which he becomes an active protagonist of the art projection.²²Wierzchowska, “Performing the Return of the Repressed,” 3. Through the process of articulation, Mark quickly gains awareness of the inconsistency of his own opinions. The aesthetic codes of screen projection art meet his taste: the “psychedelic” quality of the moving images displayed probably speaks to his sensitivity to other forms of digital media that dominate contemporary visual culture—we might think of experimental video art, music visualizers, video games, 3D graphics. At the same time, he senses something controversial in the atmosphere around the screens — the “vibe” — that induces him to accuse Til Vægs’s installations of emblemizing the gentrification of his neighborhood on an economic and symbolic level. Contrarily to the elderly resident who praises projection art as part of the larger process of material and social improvement achieved through Lundtoftegade’s architectural renovation, Mark’s negative assessment of the economic impact of gentrification on the everyday lives of locals accompanies a harsh critique of the influx of bourgeois aesthetics in his neighborhood. For my younger interviewee, cultural gentrification is an attack on the “authentic” aesthetic of Nørrebro that is dispossessing the lower-income community that he identifies with.

The notion of “authenticity” is frequently referenced in discussions about gentrification’s cultural workings. Most often, it is cited in the literature as the marketable commodity engineered by gentrifying agents to attract consumers in newly revitalized urban areas, or to rework romanticized and nostalgic narratives about a place’s past identity that serve neoliberal economic interests.²³Just to take two examples: Brandi Thompson Summers, “Race, Authenticity, and the Gentrified Aesthetics of Belonging in Washington, D.C.,” in Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City, ed. Christoph Lindner and Gerard F. Sandoval (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 118–19.; Elisa Fiore and Liedeke Plate, “Food and White Multiculturalism: Racial Aesthetics of Commercial Gentrification in Amsterdam’s Javastraat,” Space and Culture 24, no. 3 (March 25, 2021): 7, https://doi.org/10.1177/12063312211001290. In my research, however, authenticity appears as a spatial feature yearned for by an ethnic-minority local resident who, in the customary dichotomy between the gentrifying actors and the gentrified community, figures and self-identifies as a “victim” of cultural gentrification.

In an ethnography of consumer desires in North East London’s most gentrified quarters, Luke Carroll maps out the ways in which libidinal fantasies about the real thing—the artisanal, the handcrafted, the vintage, the object imbued with historical significance — structure capitalist production and middle-class consumption of gentrified space. These objects of desire, in the fantasy of those who crave them, supposedly overcome the ‘unreal’ quality of “the Other”, the mass-produced, industrial, sterile, artificial, “soulless” commodities.²⁴Carroll, 32. Similarly, Mark’s desire for the ‘real’ Nørrebro atmosphere is performed through a refusal of its opposite, namely the people, practices, and aesthetic mutations brought about by neoliberal urbanism—the ultramodern high-rise, the affluent university students, the overpriced café, the upper-class art kid. His disdain towards these new gentrifying elements matches his pride in being a native Nørrebro citizen, defender of the aesthetic archetypes of the lower-income ‘hood’ that preserve the “authentic feel” of his neighborhood. Could we argue that Mark is reproducing the nostalgic narrative of Nørrebro’s “original” identity that will ultimately displace his community, or that the storytelling of gentrification has co-opted those whose identities it exploits before erasing them?

Screen projection art occupies a liminal semantic position in Mark’s aesthetic imaginary, between the “unwelcome” novelty and the desirable “authentic”. Although “avant-garde”, projection art still belongs to the order of “street art,” which is, in Mark’s view, a befitting artistic expression for a working-class neighborhood. A comparison between projection art and other forms of street art was also drawn by my interviewee Morten, who strongly disapproves of murals for permanently damaging buildings’ facades:

Oh crap, I don’t like graffiti… not everywhere, on the walls and everywhere, I don’t like that! Yes, graffiti is a kind of art. It’s ok if you make good pictures, because many good graffiti paintings is beautiful, but not tags. Kids just go around [writing] ‘i’ve been here, i’ve been here!’—that’s shit. The same if I take my garbage and throw it outside: that’s garbage.²⁵Morten, interview.

Mark and Morten have very different conceptions of what their neighborhood ought to look like. Perhaps, in contemporary multi-culture, where aesthetics, symbols and meanings circulate globally through digital spaces just as—or more than—they do in proximal geographical space, residing in the same housing complex is not sufficient for two neighbors to share the same notion of place identity. As the individual doing the sensing of gentrified space, and of the screen projection’s gentrifying quality, Mark is the recipient as well as the co-producer of this atmosphere, which in fact does not meet Morten’s sensorial reception.²⁶Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 79.

In their analysis of Blågården, Nørrebro’s trendiest area, Danish gentrification researchers Henrik Gutzon Larsen and Anders Lund Hansen observe that the presence of welfare housing, with its multiethnic, subsidized residents, contains the encroachment of neoliberal urbanization, giving birth to an aesthetic language that rests on the co-presence of lower- and middle-class users and their lifestyles.²⁷Fie Krøyer Dahl and Karoline A. Markholst, “Byforskere: Ghettoen Er God for Nørrebro,” Berlingske, July 16, 2012, www.berlingske.dk/samfund/byforskere-ghettoen-er-god-for-noerrebro. The ‘paradox’ of Mark’s experience of screen projection art is coherent with this codification of a transforming neighborhood, in the process of gentrification, where modern non-autochthonous aesthetic elements are juxtaposed against a rundown building, a dingy streetscape, or a defiled wall.  ‘Absolute’ gentrified space is commonly recognized for its aseptic, homogenized, clean, repolished, upscale qualities, but, much like Carroll’s London gentrifiers, the subjects producing/consuming Nørrebro’s gentrification consciously reject this aesthetic in favor of a new spatial canon that allows them to pursue the fantasy of “a life beyond the everyday arrangements of late-capitalism”.²⁸Malcolm Miles, Limits to Culture: Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 43; Carroll, “Gentrification and the Critique,” 33. The critique of the incongruous ‘cool’/modern projection art in the ‘shabby’/original social housing reinforces the illusion of living above the totalizing grasp of neoliberal urbanization, while assimilating activist projection art among the contradictory visual elements that generate the vibrancy of a halfway-gentrifying neighborhood.

Conclusion

As the effects of neoliberal governance and free-market ideology intensify in cities around the world, activist art plays an ever-greater role on the battleground for bottom-up resistance against the repurposing of urban space for capitalist accumulation. My case-study highlights how activist screen projection art in contested social housing participates in this struggle through the production and circulation of dissensual messages and spatial representations of the place where it is displayed. Via this direct artistic medium, the actors of neighborhood resistance (residents, artists, activists, allies) come together on a symbolic level, and the often-suppressed voices of urban minorities can be heard in the public sphere.

Questions around resistance art’s capacity to favor the cultural and aesthetic advancement of gentrification remain open in the academic and public debate to which this research contributes. The perception of activist screen projection art as a gentrifying spatial element is not universally shared among participants in my study, but rests in the mind of the subjects who detect a disquieting contradiction when confronted with the presence of this art form in lower income housing, and are unsettled by this practice on a visceral level. The narratives about social housing and urban transformation endorsed by these subjects, consciously and unconsciously, and the spatial desires they express through their critique of screen projection art, respond to the dialectics of gentrified space in late-capitalist culture, whereby the gentrifying subject produces itself and its space through the pursuit of that which is negated by gentrified space, i.e., the pre-gentrified, original, unchanged. Through this process, the new aesthetic of a gentrifying neighborhood in transformation materializes as the juxtaposition of contradictory spatial elements, and the critical appraisal of activist projection art is reduced to an identitarian marker.

This analysis does not intend to undermine projection art’s activist potential or question the material impact of Denmark’s aggressive neoliberal urban policies on social housing residents. Rather, I hope to encourage future research on resistance art and gentrification to pay close attention to the way neoliberal consumer culture is spatializing through new aesthetic forms and producing gentrifying subjectivities in the contemporary city.

Acknowledgements: I would like to express my gratitude to all the interviewees who contributed to these conversations. Additionally, I thank Mark Vacher from the University of Copenhagen for his patient and ongoing support throughout my research process and beyond.

Pauline Panetta

Pauline Joelle Panetta is a freelancer currently based in Matera, Southern Italy. Her interests cross critical urban theory, ethnographic research methods, culture, media, art and architecture. In 2021, she completed her MA in Applied Cultural Analysis at the University of Copenhagen with a thesis on the spatial impact of screen projection art in a highly politicized social-housing complex.