ABSTRACT
This chapter moves from the intimacy of walls, to urban realms where the body is displayed in contentious events. The practices I term ‘urban embodiment’ involve face-to-face informative encounters in Chilean streets; art interventions, flashmobs, and other old but renewed repertoires placed in urban points; and marches and rallies in the main avenues of Chilean cities. The chapter sets these actions from a performative and representational perspective. With reference to the art interventions, it portrays them as the display of an embodied collaboration inviting people to be part of an engaging cohabitation and raising awareness of a common life. In terms of their representational side, the movement had a lively experience of a ‘we’ that allowed people to see and be part of something bigger than the individual, with a growing awareness of the power of a growing social and political body. The chapter concludes by suggesting that intervening in the city and disrupting its 24/7 rationale through the bodies of activists, carried a collaborative will that, along with rendering a ‘we’, brought the opportunity to feel that as a body, people were finally speaking to a political adversary.
