TOWARDS THE SUMMER CITY

An exhibition that begins a work of iconography.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

"Towards the Summer City" explores how the city can integrate the intensity and transformation inherent in summer to rethink its structures and uses. Far from being a simple season, summer is a force of subjectivation, a state of overheating where bodies, rhythms, and spaces are redefined.

Urban megastructures, often designed for stability and efficiency, struggle to absorb this seasonal intensity, yet essential to urban dynamics. How can the city become a living infrastructure, where rigid architecture opens up to new forms of mobility, porosity, and collective appropriation?

Through painting, photography, writing, and installations, this project examines the mutations of a city searching for its summer, a territory where heat, light, and the flow of inhabitants influence the way spaces are experienced, inhabited, and reinvented. Towards the Summer City offers a reinterpretation of urban infrastructures as structures capable of hosting the rituals of subjectivation and the intensity specific to summer.

KEY FEATURES

01 Painting: exploration of tensions and megastructures.
02 Photography: capturing urban fragments that express the city through the lens of heat and suspended time.
03 Writing: reflective texts on the city and its situations of subjectivation.

PROJECT IN NUMBERS

16 acrylic paintings
23 photos (various formats)
4 large-format texts

REFRENCES

Henri Lefebvre – The Right to the City (1968): Lefebvre theorizes the city as a space of social production and constant transformation. His approach to urban rhythm and the sensory experiences of everyday life resonates strongly with the idea of a summer city, where urban temporality is transformed.

Michel de Certeau – The Invention of Everyday Life (1980): He explores how residents reclaim the city through their daily practices, which can be compared to the summer city and its intense coexistence.

Aby Warburg – The Atlas of Mnemosyne (1924-1929): His approach to constellations of images and memory can be an interesting methodology for mapping the summer city as a space of changing iconography.

Tim Ingold – Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011): Ingold proposes an approach where the city is perceived by bodies in motion, through walking and sensory experience—a central concept in a summer city.