ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on an informal community in Vila Nova, Brazil and examines how art might be understood as a form of knowledge production that seeks new imaginings. Art practices produce situations in which otherness and forms of improvisation that would not otherwise be apparent are given legitimacy. By working in collaboration with local residents, the chapter argues that informal urban strategies become tools for negotiating logics of governance, power, formality and authority, from within the city. Art tactics of improvisation are pertinent within the wider knowledge economy, but at a local level they utilise low-tech skills and practical know-how to act into the contingency of situations. The chapter also focuses on the case of a community based art intervention named Nomadic Kitchen to examine how such a collaborative space of social encounter was produced and to ask what political, social and economic logics were encountered through this process of informal production.