Linha de Sintra, Racism, and Culture Rise
A new street hypothesis
Recently I have been exploring the culture from the other side of the Sintra Mountains.
As a multidisciplinary researcher exploring the interface between science, culture, and technology it is increasing in me the need to get closer to the local communities in my hometown. By now I do not understand if it is cause or consequence of my postdoctororal work in the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails European Lighthouse project, in which “locally-grounded” is a core value for the pilot projects happening in 7 European coastal cities — Lisbon, Oeiras, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Malmo, Venice, and Genoa.
As a resident in Sintra, my connection with the city was never too tight. I was at the Sintra High School from 2004 to 2007 but my rural hometown is sufficiently far from Sintra to block any major cultural influence. Being a small town boy in Sintra was a learning experience. I had a similar learning experience when I entered university in Lisbon, because being a small town boy in a bigger city is a steeper experience. The thing is I commutted from Sintra to Lisbon. The train was the connector. And the Sintra railway line was the ultimate cultural and social vehicle.
Linha de Sintra (Sintra train railway line) is the European territory with most Afro-descendants. I heard this today in an event organized by Kubata — Casa de Potencialização Artística na Linha de Sintra, held in Casa da Juventude da Tapada das Mercês (@kubata.casa). During the last month this was the third event related to art and culture in Linha de Sintra that I participated. The other two happened in Pendão em Movimento, Queluz (@pendao_em_movimento).
So, here I come to share my early thoughts about something I am starting to feel and experience. I hope it continues due to three main reasons:
- I am starting to feel more connected with a community in which I also belong;
- I am giving a body to my creative vision this year;
- I have been disconnected from my territory and the very interesting and real community-level work and movements happening here for too long.
Periphery and streetstyle
Where does the culture comes from? The street.
To where the city grows? The periphery.
It is undeniable. The street is the heyday of culture since the street is the connector between people and between people and places. No memory construction and no life can happen outside the street. However, streets connect and divide. Streets lead to and are escape routes. Streets are the synapses of the urbanities. We are the dopamine. Where is life there is streets. Where there is will to move there is streets. Streets are connectors. Where is a need to go, to return, to flee, a street is the place to go.
The city is the apex of the civilization with its central services. Cities concentrate everything and provides most for many. However, cities do not provide everything for everybody. Sometimes, its streets tend to be too equal, too authoritarian, extinguishing the difference. Therefore, cities, with their centrality, are to provide for the majority. If the city becomes too crowded for majorities, where does the minorities go? There is a place where a city goes, almost ashamed, shyly, to express its anxieties, longings, and unheard and unwanted aspirations — the periphery. The periphery is the harbour for the many, for all those who do not fit in the major central rule of the nervous city. Lacking formal boundaries, the periphery is multicultural and is as diverse as it can get. To cut it short and sharp, in my view a city does not provide the means for any culture to arise, since it seeks homogeneity. Othwerwise, the periphery does it by nature.
This is why we should nurture the periphery as the birthplace of culture. One issue is that this cultural landscape and expression hotspot come from the struggle of being discriminatied and marginalized. The white global north as a system owns the periphery at will, manages it at large and leaves the people at bay. Hence, all the culture is standing unattended throughout the periphery, hanging, ready to be extracted. Another issue is that this culture harvest is done without the due respect or fair tradeoff for their rightfull owners. In summary, the periphery is providing and the city is absorbing.
The mechanism responsible for such extinguishment and one-way exhange is the racism. Racism is a fact and quite alive in Portugal. It has been here forever. It is time to accept it and envision a way out of it, urgently.
One example — city vs periphery
Fashion, as an example I use quite a lot, is a clear case of the city as a no-go place for creativity. Virgil Abloh built a space for black young people to enhance their cultural expression. He used his practice and major roles with Kanye West and Louis Vuitton as platforms to open and hold doors, even after his departure. His legacy is a landmark for black young people, allowing them to dream, empowering them to act within a system that was not developed for them (check for instance FREE GAME).
As I heard today in Kubata,
“we live art everywhere, since we are always thinking about art, sleeping on art, creating art, our struggle is only possible because of art, we are art”,
and this reality — belonging to the Afro-descendants, migrants and all those people who belongs to the place of arrivals but are not originally from those places, feeling aside — is the go-place for creativity.
From an unsolved leadership crisis we are entering in a creativity crisis (1, 2,3,4). This new crisis is adamant. How on earth are we paralyzed with the available amount of knowledge and tools at display? With no trivial answer despite the informative explanation from Barry Schwartz (5), the truth is that we are paralyzed as a species. Major fashion groups are copying and grabbing all street culture and, in a anapologetic and unhetical appropriation business behaviour (6,7,8,9,10), they are channeling the money for the sake of the status quo systems: capitalism, racism, global north, gender and social inequality, and many others.
So, what can be done?
A Hypothesis
Kubata and Pendão em Movimento are putting in place community-led mechanisms through which art and culture can be channeled for the improvement of the local community itself. Their local knowledge is expanding the artistic practice of many, creating a communication platform to disseminate what is being done in Linha de Sintra as a territory with an authentic identity. The goal is quite amusing and urgent: to creatively homage the struggle by loving the effort of living. These homages, expressed through strong messages, artistic performances, and visual pieces, create a new kind of street. Such new street is no more a connector between the city and the periphery, but it represents a road between the oral memory and the future, with all its ambitions of freedom, equality, and inclusion. A street as a place to go to meet others, and not to flee from the opressor, or from all the forces that pull back. A street like this is a new expression of the city but it destroys the concept of the city as a territory with frontiers, allowing a diverse range of opportunities without polishing the uniqueness and the difference coming from its inhabitants. In a way, the new street is a safe and communal place. A place that abolishes the old racist rules of power by pushing a novel power strucutre where art and culture take the centre stage.
Let’s build this street. Together. Unifying both sides of the Sintra Mountains and inviting broader national and international audiences to Linha de Sintra.
Contacts:
ist79225 studio c/o cristiano pedroso-roussado
ist79225@gmail.com
References
(1) Barbot, B., & Said‐Metwaly, S. (2021). Is there really a creativity crisis? A critical review and meta‐analytic re‐appraisal. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 55(3), 696–709.
(2) Titton, M. (2023). Overcoming the creative crisis of the Fashion Industry. Fashion Highlight, (2), 44–50.
(4) https://www.robhopkins.net/2018/09/20/kyung-hee-kim-on-the-creativity-crisis/
(5) Schwartz, B. (2015). The paradox of choice. Positive psychology in practice: Promoting human flourishing in work, health, education, and everyday life, 121–138.
(7) https://www.thestreet.com/retail/global-fashion-brand-under-fire-for-allegedly-copying-designs
(8) Ayres, J. (2017). Inspiration or prototype? Appropriation and exploitation in the fashion industry. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 4(2), 151–165.
(9) Pozzo, B. (2020). Fashion between inspiration and appropriation. Laws, 9(1), 5.
(10) Park, J., & Chun, J. (2023). What does cultural appropriation mean to fashion design?. Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 10(3), 295–310.
