The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (David Harvey)1David Harvey, “The Right to the City”, New Left Review 53 (September/October 2008), 23.
Drawing inspiration from David Harvey’s powerful words, I begin this dossier with a reminder of the profound connection between cities and society. Cities are crafted in the image and likeness of our social structures, reflecting and reinforcing our communal bonds. However, in the face of neoliberal and neo-fascist agendas that promote individualism, segregation, and division, our sense of community is increasingly threatened. Cities are under threat, but they are also the ideal battleground to contest, resist, and generate a political response to our disintegrating world. How can we reclaim our cities and, in doing so, reshape the world around us? While these questions might seem rhetorical, they highlight a crucial truth: we possess the power to craft and project our resistance. This dossier explores the concept of projection activism, presenting it as a dynamic tool for temporarily transforming urban spaces and, by extension, our world.
In recent times, projection has garnered significant attention within film, media, and screen studies, in part due to the digitization of production, distribution and exhibition channels and the pervasive presence of projections in our everyday lives. By occupying space and transforming our sense of place, urban projections, media façades, and urban screens populate our mediated cities. However, they are more than just aesthetic installations; in the right circumstances, projections can act as political tools. In Andy Buchanan’s words, projection and light-based art “act politically by simply activating spaces and their occupants in novel situations, revealing presumptions, restrictions, and conventions of the use of shared space, with the addition of projected images or light displays evoking a reassessment of the built environment.”2Andy Buchanan, “Projection Art and Projection Activism,” Architecture_MPS 20, no. 1 (2021): 7. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2021v20i1.001 Activist groups such as Led By Donkeys, The Illuminator, the Cinematofica Collective, and artists such as Robin Bell, Jenny Holzer, and Krzysztof Wodiczko have employed projection art to address political agendas. Their interventions in urban spaces, often unauthorized and executed through guerrilla tactics, constitute political acts. By projecting messages and images onto our built environment, particularly on political edifices used as urban screens, their works embody a claim for the right to the city beyond mere consumption and the spectacularisation of urban space.
Although projection activism represents an efficient strategy for engaging the public sphere with themes of dissensus, resistance, and political struggle, it has remained on the periphery of contemporary scholarship. As one of the strategies we can collectively employ to envision an alternative world, projection activism deserves more attention. This dossier explores the fascinating triangulation of projection, activism, and urban politics through a rich, interdisciplinary lens. By bringing together curators, artists, public art experts, and activists, it offers diverse perspectives on how projections can serve as powerful political tools that both reflect and reshape our cities and society.
The dossier opens with Giuseppe Previtali’s discussion of visual and textual activism in political uprisings, comparing May 1968 in Paris with contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter. He highlights how both movements used visual symbols, urban projection and slogans to challenge the status quo, express collective desires for political change, and critique oppressive power structures. Focusing on the Shining Joy projections in Regina, Giorgia Rizzioli explores projection activism as a feminist spatial practice, emphasizing its potential to disempower gendered and patriarchal urban spaces in favour of a feminist city vision. Drawing on feminist posthumanism and assemblage theory, she argues that projection activism functions as a dynamic network of human and nonhuman elements, creating spaces of resistance and dissent. By projecting activist content onto urban surfaces, these interventions are gestures of feminist placemaking, which transform public spaces into sites of protest, while also engaging with digital platforms to amplify their impact.
In a captivating dialogue, Duncan Whitley and Mel Jordan discuss Whitley’s film Phoenix City 2021, created for the Coventry Biennial as part of the UK City of Culture 2021. They examine how site-responsive projections can disrupt conventional placemaking stories and the political aspects of the City of Culture initiative. Their discussion covers themes of urban regeneration, the displacement of artistic communities in Coventry, and the gentrification of its city centre. In this setting, the various screenings of the film serve as a deliberate and strategic reaction to the city’s neoliberal renewal plans. Coventry is also the topographical reference for Michael Pigott’s contribution, which explores the concept of using projected moving images to transform buildings, particularly modernist and Brutalist structures, into screens. Playing with the terms concrete-concrète, which reflects a dualism between ephemerality and permanence, Pigott investigates the screenic potential of surfaces and encourages new ways of imagining and understanding the buildings’ roles within urban and political contexts.
Lastly, Pauline Joelle Panetta investigates the spatial effects of activist projection art and screen projections created by Til Vægs, a grassroots art and activism platform based in the notorious public housing complex, Lundtoftegade, in Copenhagen’s working-class neighborhood of Nørrebro. Using an ethnographic approach, Panetta reveals the perspectives and attitudes that people often express when discussing screen projection arts and gentrification, highlighting the difficulty in acknowledging their contradictory nature in the public sphere.
These engaging contributions remind us that the city is not just a physical space but a canvas for reimagining our world. In such a context, projection activism offers a vital means for reclaiming the power to shape our cities, and by extension, our future. Lighting up our right to the city is one of the imperatives we should follow.
Notes
Dr Giorgia Rizzioli is a researcher in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures in Coventry University, UK, where she is an active member of the ArtSpaceCity research strand. She delves into the realm of cinematic placemaking, investigating how curating and exhibiting expanded cinema through outdoor projections is a way of understanding cinema spatialisation as a material and spatial agency in (making) places. She contributed as junior curator to the Coventry Biennial Hyper-Possible 2021, with the projection Screening Coventry: Past is Now (April 2022). Her recent publications include ‘Introducing Open Montage: Material Performativity in Urban Media Configurations in Space’, co-authored with Mel Jordan and published in NECSUS- European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2024.
