Скачать или смотреть Juri Igor Fardin XXXVII 1st Year

Play Aesthetics ; Between the Figures of Skateboarding, Ugo La Pietra and Playtime

This research project focuses on play as a specific way of using spaces and bodies—what can be defined as an aesthetics—through a historical study and theoretical reading of three figures of play: skateboarding outside of Milan’s central train station, Ugo La Pietra’s works and Jacques Tati’s movie Playtime. These phenomena draw an arch that stretches between the end of the 1960s and today, a period that—following philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Guy Debord—is characterized by the impossibility of a use that exceeds both consumption and spectacular exhibition; an impossibility already emblematized by Monsieur Hulot’s bodily relations to space in the movie Playtime. Yet, these figures are not simple articulations of this impossibility of use, they also suggest that there is a specific way of using this (im)possibility; they show spaces and bodies as a field of polar tensions in which a specific type of use can happen—play.