ABSTRACT

The chapter focuses on the artistic activation of marginal urban spaces during the 1970s and the 1980s through performative gestures. By mapping selected places and analysing examples of event-based art, the text claims that such actions blurred the boundaries between artistic and non-artistic, private and public, and can be interpreted along a dynamic theory of place and specific politics of exhibition. It also contends that such low-profile individual actions belonged to an alternative visibility in the hope of transforming the existing artistic milieu.