Urban DramatUrgy
The Global Art Project of JR
Bertie Ferdman
“WELCOME TO THE INSIDE OUT PROJECT.
A collaboration between the artist JR, the TED prize, and you.”
The excerpt above is on the home page of Inside Out (www.insideoutproject
.net), a large-scale participatory art project “that transforms messages of per-
sonal identity into pieces of artistic work.”1 The premise is straightforward:
you upload a black-and-white portrait of yourself, along with a statement regarding
the social change you desire, or what you stand for, or what you care about in this
world. Your uploaded digital image is made into an oversized poster and sent back
to you, for you to exhibit (paste) in your local community, anywhere that is public,
no permit necessary. As the Website explains:
People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed
anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits
on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be
documented, archived and viewable virtually.
The artist behind this global art project is JR, the recent TED prize winner now
turned international art star, thanks largely to this TED glory and its subsequent
media frenzy. A self-proclaimed “artivist”—somewhere between an artist and an
activist—and a “photograffeur”—somewhere between a photographer and a graffiti
artist—who still goes only by his initials (“if I had to disclose my real name . . . él
would deviate from the people and the meaning of my work”), JR is renowned for
illegally pasting oversized portraits of individuals in cities across the world. He has
“exhibited” his projects in conflict zones and extremely poor neighborhoods, entre
them Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya; Providencia in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil; Clichy-sous-
Bois in the outskirts of Paris, Francia; and the Israel/Palestine border. All of these
were part of a larger project titled 28 Millimeters, whereby JR took portraits with a
28mm lens, forcing him to photograph his subjects from very close up, and simul-
taneously gaining their trust to do so.
For Portrait of a Generation for example, the first of his 28 Millimeter series, cual
he initiated in 2005 after his first “guerrilla” exhibition in the streets of Montfermeil
12 PAJ 102 (2012), páginas. 12–25.
© 2012 Bertie Ferdman
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en 2004 and after the riots that spread throughout France, JR worked in collabora-
tion with friend and colleague Ladj Ly, a local filmmaker, to respond to the desires
of the youngsters from this working-class suburb of Paris to be photographed, y
pasted the oversized images in buildings throughout the neighborhood. Portrait of a
Generation eventually grew to feature photographs of the youths making grimaces.
Responding to the riots’ mass media coverage of these first and second-generation
immigrants as alienated, criminal, and dangerous, JR and his collaborators appro-
priated these negative images by exaggerating how others viewed them, becoming
somewhat comic, grotesque, and quite effectively, charming and approachable. JR
glued the giant images in the fancy central district of Paris, where the cités residents
were often not welcome, and where they could not afford to live.
It was a way to break the subjects’ isolation, if only through mediated means, y
activate them in different environments. The images, in their new setting, performed
an alternate city: one filled with tensions its citizens did not necessarily want to
confront. “I pasted huge posters everywhere,” explains JR, “in the bourgeois area
of Paris, with their name, edad, and building number.” In 2006, one year after the
riots came to an end, but not necessarily the tensions that had sparked them, el
“official” exhibition of Portrait of a Next Generation was displayed in the city hall
of Paris, forcing onlookers to contemplate the distinctions, discriminations, y
inequalities that had fueled such anger in the first place.
The second of JR’s 28 Millimeter project was Face2Face, completed in 2007 y
considered by many as one of the largest illegal urban art exhibits in the world. Él
covered the entire surface of the Israeli West Bank Barrier with paired portraits of
Palestinians and Israelis that held the same job and made a similar expression for
the camera. Working with his collaborators as well as on-site volunteers, JR posted
these large-format portraits side-by-side, face-to-face, on both the Israeli and the
Palestinian sides of the wall, so that onlookers could barely tell who was from the
other side of the fence. His documentary Women are Heroes (released in 2010) fea-
tures the last of the 28 Millimeter series, which focused on portraits of women and
documents the work he did in Cambodia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, India, and Brazil,
spanning over three years. In Kibera for example, rooftops were covered with water
resistant vinyl photos of the eyes and faces of the women who live there, both vis-
ibly changing the landscape and preventing the rain from damaging the shacks. El
train that passed on the Kibera line was also covered with the eyes of the women
that live right below it, with the bottom halves of their faces pasted on the slope
right under the tracks, so that in the few seconds that the train passed their faces
were completed; the idea being to celebrate, and at the very least to acknowledge,
these women’s presence.
What draws me to JR’s portraits, besides their striking aesthetic appeal, are the
ways these perform alternative narratives of city spaces by giving a voice, a través de
the medium of photography, to actors/inhabitants who are often otherwise ignored
by the mainstream media, and who often live in poverty. In order to accomplish
this goal JR very strategically chooses to remain, at least symbolically, anonymous,
almost like the Robin Hood of the art world:
FERDMAN / Urban Dramaturgy 13
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Top: 28
Millimetres:
Portrait of a
Generación,
photo of Ladj
Ly pasted in
Clichy-sous-Bois,
2004. Bottom:
Inside Out,
Ciudad Juarez,
2011. Photos:
JR. Courtesy the
artist.
14 PAJ 102
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The majority of “graffeurs” (graffiti artists) begin by tagging their name on
the walls. I take the names and above all the faces of people that live in
the margins of society and give them back their individuality. That might
seem paradoxical, but it’s almost like I don’t have a name and I give them
back theirs, their lettres des noblesse, to those whose name we have forgotten.
JR’s work, which he refers to as “participatory art,” and as “pervasive art,” spreads
exponentially through the globe as regular citizens begin to take up more physical
space than they are normally allowed, or used to. In all his projects, JR spends months
getting to know the population of the neighborhood he is encountering, working
alongside them not only to paste their own portraits in huge format, but also to
decide where to paste these. As the photos get washed away, the work eventually
disappears, leaving only its documentation as both proof that the work existed, y
as the work itself (the documentation is what eventually gets exhibited inside the
gallery). But “the oeuvre is the collage, more than the portrait itself,” explains JR in
a 2009 interview at the Rencontres d’Arles, the Arts Photo Festival where his work
was featured in the spaces of the city. “When I began . . . I immediately used the
street as my gallery. . . . And little by little I enlarged the photos to adapt them to
the architecture.” Hence there is both a site-specific and an ephemeral component
to his work—seeing the pasted poster-sized portrait in city space—rather than a
picture of this urban installation. This mise-en-scène creates a contemporary form of
urban storytelling, captivating the imagination of passersby whereby space and site
are recreated and reimagined to tell yet untold narratives.
As a self-taught photographer, JR is more inspired by a photography lineage than
by the visual arts (painting, sculpture, conceptual art, etc.). His work stems from
street art movements but also fits into a trajectory of politically inspired artwork
like Happenings, which shares a common ground in terms of the work’s ephemeral-
ity and its participatory element. Besides parallels with artists like Blu and Banksy,
whose anti-establishment stance is part of the work’s rhetoric, JR’s installations also
reflect the latest trend in contemporary art practice, what art critic Claire Bishop
has termed “the social turn” in her often-quoted essay from Artforum, “The Social
Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” Performance scholar Shannon Jackson
takes Bishop’s terminology in her latest book Social Acts, discussing at length art
works whose aesthetics and social provocations coincide and unsettle “some of the
binary frames that many use to judge both social efficacy and aesthetic legitimacy.”2
It is particularly at this juncture in JR’s work—where the aesthetic and the social
meet—and how he seems to both balance and deny this partnership altogether, eso
his work is most poignant. To what extent he aestheticizes the city as opposed to
re-appropriating its already-established aesthetic is elusive and depends highly on
the medium-specific apparatus by which one critiques his work. Like many of the
artists Jackson discusses in her book who walk a fine line between aesthetics and
política (Paul Chan, Santiago Sierra, Rimini Protokoll, and Francis Alÿs, entre
otros), JR is adamant to separate his politics from his art, clearly demarcating the
“art” as the autonomous space where things can happen.
FERDMAN / Urban Dramaturgy 15
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28 Millimetres: Women Are Heroes, view of Favela Morro Da Providencia, Río de Janeiro, 2008.
Photo: JR. Courtesy the artist.
16 PAJ 102
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FERDMAN / Urban Dramaturgy 17
In an interview in 2006, conducted in the Journal de 13H on France 2, a popular
French TV channel, JR was asked, in reference to his 28 Millimeter project in
Clichy: What does this project provide to the members of the community you
worked with? “First of all,” he answers, “this is not a social or political project. Es
first of all an artistic one, which is why I am not a spokesperson for the youth of
Clichy, so I don’t search to change things in that way, but it is really a project we
did together. I am very happy that in fact, through these artworks, the image of
these youngsters change.”
En efecto, the notion of “change” and how it operates in projects that engage art as
social action is of particular importance in gauging this kind of work. In her essay,
Bishop makes the claim that “these practices are less interested in a relational aes-
thetic than in the creative rewards of collaborative activity—whether in the form of
working with preexisting communities or establishing one’s own interdisciplinary
network.”3 In JR’s case, sin embargo, he makes the explicit demarcation that his work not
be judged by the efficacy of its civic engagement, even though it clearly resembles
what Suzanne Lacy has described as New Genre Public Art, summarized here by
Bishop as “temporary projects that directly engage an audience—particularly groups
considered marginalized—as active participants in the production of a process-
oriented, politically conscious community event or program.” On the contrary,
JR’s insistence in the ability to sustain art’s autonomy is precisely what makes his
work able to engage in civic discourse. After all, it was the beauty of his images
(documenting the projects) that drew me to his work before I discovered there was a
commitment to social activism. In his acceptance speech for the TED prize, cual
itself is committed to spreading ideas that can impact “change,” JR states:
In some ways, art can change the world. I mean, art is not supposed to
change the world, the practical things. But it can change perceptions. Él
can change the way we see the world. . . . De hecho, the fact that art cannot
change things, makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussion. (mi
emphasis)
Precisely by distancing art from what he very clearly aspires art to do, eso es, a
change something (our perceptions, sociedad, dialogue, etc.), does he seem to achieve
él. En otras palabras, he introduces change by alienating art from the political and the
social, necessarily clinging to its very autonomy (as neutral!) in order to produce
highly involved community-oriented installations. This seems to be his modus
operandi. “Je suis un colleur d’affiches” (I am a poster paster) is his reply to: Are you
politically engaged? “I search with my art to install the work in improbable places,
to create with the communities projects that promote questioning . . . and to offer
alternative images to those of the global media.”4 Of particular interest is the way
he enters the art world market, selling limited editions of photographs as art com-
modities, in order to raise money that goes back to financing the work, Por ejemplo
a cultural center in Providencia, y 2000 square meters of new rooftops to further
seal the community’s homes in Kibera.5 If anything, these projects, although artisti-
cally driven, are socially committed.
18 PAJ 102
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For his TED Prize 2011 award of $100,000, which is used to fund the winner’s
“One Wish to Change the World,” JR chose to turn the world “inside out”—in
order to enable others to occupy space with their own photographic portraits. Qué
is elemental about Inside Out is what one does with the poster-size printed images
once they are uploaded digitally and sent back. Where does one choose to paste
a ellos? What space, in one’s community, in one’s everyday environment, in one’s city,
does one wish to occupy? The statement one wishes to deliver becomes the space
taken over with the image(s). En otras palabras, it is the performance of these mediated
images that defines the work. The portrait by itself is not complete. It is the contact
with everyday public space, a contact with a specific site that provides the context
for the work to exist and gives it meaning. Y todavía, because most of these pasted
images will eventually disappear (get washed away, torn down, or pasted over), el
(arte) work also exists as a digital virtual archive of what interventions took place.
There are numerous videos on the Website as well as a YouTube channel devoted to
the project, with a Web Series directed by Alastair Siddons (who is currently working
on a documentary feature about JR’s Inside Out) in which one can see the process
behind many of the interventions that have taken place throughout the world. Pero
the Internet and digital media here are not just a repository of the work: they are also
the means by which the project exists. Inside Out, while stemming from low-tech,
low-production (a.k.a. low budget) street art, is just as rooted in advances in tech-
nology that facilitate global communication as much as it is in its grassroots appeal.
JR’s Inside Out project, like much of his other work, creates alternative cities through
both mediated performance strategies and the performance practices of media. His use
of social media practices (in terms of creating art solely with user-generated content)
circumvents the larger economies of the art world value narrative with a desire to
provide agency for citizens to shape their cities. JR’s images are not isolated: ellos son
part of a carefully construed mise-en-scène whose dramaturgy is intricately connected
to the communicative strategies he uses to create and document the work. Through
the proliferation of large-scale portraits pasted across the globe, and through media
and the performance of media (where he “stages” his photos) for actor/citizens, JR
seeks to reattribute a platform.
JR’s Inside Out would not be possible without the advent of the Internet and digital
media practices, which permit the artist to get others around the globe involved. Si,
as Andy Warhol suggests in his Philosophy of Andy Warhol, “before media there used
to be a physical limit on how much space one person could take up by themselves,"
now that space has been exponentially multiplied.6 JR’s Inside Out seeks precisely to
take up as much space as possible by as many people as possible. Sin embargo, mientras
Warhol’s quote stems from a fascination with fame, JR’s interest here is in displaying
and reproducing otherwise anonymous, and often times unwanted, faces that live
and work in the sites they choose to exhibit. Y, with Inside Out, and the TED
team’s crucial marketing help, he has potentially created a Facebook of art-making:
owned and created by the people/actors who participate in it. “I don’t use any brand
of corporate sponsor,” JR has repeatedly said, “so I have no responsibility to anyone
FERDMAN / Urban Dramaturgy 19
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Inside Out Project, Tunisia, 2011. Top: Pasting on the ex-house of the Ben Ali party. Bottom: Pasting in the
former police station of La Goulette (Tunis) burned during the revolution. On the ground are all the identity
cards with photos and fingerprints of the population. Photos: JR. Courtesy the artist.
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20 PAJ 102
but myself and the subject.”7 Precisely because his work walks a fine line between
images (for art’s sake) and advertising, alluding in a way to the very Warholian
notion of art as marketing, the very “marketing” of his project seems implicitly part
of the work. There is a sense that the global digital machinery, which also enables
large-scale corporate marketing campaigns to exist, is put to work with Inside Out
at the local level, for and by the individuals who choose to participate.
While Inside Out speaks directly to matters of uneven distribution of power and
inequality—about the city—it also indirectly deals with the problem of the art
establishment by eluding and therefore creating new apparatuses simultaneously
outside and from within the very institution that labels his work as “art,” redefining
how we view and display the work. By taking the literal (and physical) space of the
street into the virtual commons, a space where we can all upload our images and
then see the myriad interventions that have taken place, Inside Out produces new
frameworks by which others can create and reclaim their cities. The art belongs to
no one and everyone.
Take Artocracy for example (Artocratie en Tunisie), one of Inside Out’s first installa-
ciones, which took place in Tunisia March 16–23, less than two months after the Arab
Spring street demonstrations that eventually ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben
Alí, in January 2011. It happened before the official launch of the Inside Out Website,
so the photographs were not technically uploaded to the server but are nevertheless
archived there. The project was launched by Slim Zeghal and Marco Berrebi, y
realized by photographers Sophia Baraket, Rania Douraï, Wissal Darguèche, Aziz
Tnani, Hichem Driss, and Hela Ammar, all of who volunteered their time and
expertise. They asked hundreds people to have their portraits taken. Sometimes they
would stop them on the street, let them know what this was about, and enter into
a discussion about the future of their country as the photos were taken.
Eventually they, along with hundreds of volunteers, pasted the images in symbolic
places around the neighborhood of Tunis, le Kram, and Sidi Bouzid, the village
where the revolution started. One young boy who was interviewed (in Inside Out,
Episode 1, YouTube) tells of his initial skepticism: “At first I didn’t understand what
you were doing, pasting portraits everywhere.” After an open discussion, he opens
to the idea of seeing “hundreds, thousands of people that are not famous. Ellos son
not stars, they are not journalists. They are people like us. . . . It’s not the same faces,
but it’s the same people.” Instead of Ben Ali, whose image was the only one allowed
to be pasted in public—and it was everywhere—Inside Out was now enabling the
people of Tunisia, via the medium of photography, to take over spaces formerly
occupied by the autocratic ruler. Portraits were pasted at The Big Wall of Ben Ali,
his former headquarters and former police centers. Inside Out was thus mediating the
performance of freedom, in public, by having spectators/actors participate in their
own democracy. “The cult of personality is over,” declared another participant, “now
it’s the people. All the social classes are represented. Ahora, we recognize ourselves.”
FERDMAN / Urban Dramaturgy 21
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Beside Tunisia, Inside Out has by now, as I write these lines, reached almost 9,000
locations, with a total of 226 projects and over 74,000 uploaded photos. The project
spans numerous countries including Pakistan, the United States, Australia, Portugal,
South Africa, Canada, Venezuela, y Tailandia, among many others. The minimal
Web technology in developing countries (on the African and Asian continents, en
particular) as well as prevalent censorship in non-democratic countries might be
reasons to assume why Inside Out has not reached a more diverse range of popula-
ciones, as the Internet itself purports to access. Recientemente, sin embargo, it came to the much
mediatized Ciudad Juarez, whose escalating violence due to the drug trade has caused
a devastating toll: en 2010 solo, 3000 people were murdered in the city, according
to CNN Mexico. Photographer Mónica Lozano conceived of “Inside Out Project
Juarez,” as a reaction to the constant negative media attention her native Juarez
received in the international press while she was living abroad. Wanting instead to
depict “the real faces” of the city, and yet, according to the Inside Out Juarez blog,
“not denying the difficulties they go through,” Lozano joined forces with fourteen
other local photographers who took more than 1,000 portraits of people from all
social classes (ver: http://insideoutjuarez.tumblr.com).
Together with a team of more than forty volunteers, they pasted the images on
Octubre 29, 2011, on both sides of the Rio Bravo, the border between Mexico and
the United States. The word “PEACE” was inscribed in English with the photographs
on the Juarez side, and “AMOR,” in Spanish on the American side. Even though
Lozano had provided for the proper permits before the installation, the “action”
was halted by American patrols that had apparently not been notified. Despite this
small impediment, “Inside Out Project Juarez” represented one of the largest Inside
Out projects to date and influenced other similar “movements” elsewhere, entre
them “Inside Out El Paso.” It received significant media exposure, which is precisely
what Lozano had hoped for when she imagined the project: to change the image
of Ciudad Juarez in the eyes of the international community, and to emphasize the
people’s strength and endurance during such trying times. The “feel good” peaceful
art message of the project was nevertheless contextualized through Lozano’s own
realistic aspirations (themselves posted on the Facebook page for the project):
Pasting photos on walls won’t resolve the problems confronted presently by
the city. It will not console those who have lost loved ones, nor bring back
the peace in which we lived before. We are conscience of this and do not
search for this. Sin embargo, we want our project to be a kind of spark that
results in a positive thought, if only one. (my translation)
JR’s Inside Out is here a completely local phenomenon—a global art project with
local ramifications, responding to local problems, mounted by local people. The work
belongs to those who created it and to those who saw it. Inside Out, conceptualized
by JR as a “global art project,” was only the motor behind such installations, similar
to the way social media was itself conceived. The collage in this case was an “action,"
with people’s involvement their participation, manifested clearly by the police’s will
to stop the art that was actually “happening.”
22 PAJ 102
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Face2Face Project, wall on the Palestinian Side, after Bethlehem Check Point, 2007.
Photo: JR. Courtesy the artist.
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28 Millimetres: Women Are Heroes, aerial view of Kibera, Kenya, 2009. Photo: JR.
Courtesy the artist.
FERDMAN / Urban Dramaturgy 23
The act of pasting one’s mediated image unto a public space is an urban strategy of
performing one’s city. The image’s new presence in situ, as it is now re-inscribed in
the city, allows for different associations regarding what that urban space was/is for,
its history, and its potential futures. The use of digital reproduction in performance,
as it is used in Inside Out, theatricalizes city space with alarming and immediate
presence, precisely because this mode of technology enables participants to com-
municate as well as produce (upload and paste), seeking to create a more democratic
spreading of communicative power. Aquí, the real (the individual photographed)
becomes spectacular, and the spectacular (mediated images that perform the city),
now real. It is a literal space where the aesthetic and the social coincide: but JR’s
conceptual framing of the project seems to cancel the other out constantly.
In Guy Debord’s “society of spectacle,” his term for the alienating and omnipresent
culture industry, where “the spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is
everywhere,” the only possibility of rupturing the system is from within the very
structures that define and enable it. With Inside Out, the act of pasting, the performa-
tive gestus or utterance, alters the agency/subject dynamic. It substitutes the culture
industry for cultural empowerment. As participants upload photos and literally site
these mediated images, they are co-opting Debord’s society of spectacle logic, si
only at the instance when the action is performed, moving toward Debord’s own
proposed psychogeographic practices. By using the dominant system’s very mode
of production alternatively, and territorially, in the city, subjects (now agents) come
to understand more their own existence and desires. Given the time he was writing,
and the fact that he was one of the main, if not the main proponent of The Situ-
ationists, Debord’s position and hope in recuperating agency, lies in the occupation
and re-imagination of the city:
Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environ-
ment by capitalism, cual, true to its logical development toward absolute
domination, poder (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its
own peculiar décor.8
So re-appropriating the city is for Debord of key importance to break the décor.
Seen amidst the current movements such as Occupy Wall Street that have sprung
throughout the world, Inside Out also performs it own urban speech act, por lo cual
the mise-en-scène of the image—its literal production mounted live in city space—
utters the invisible visible: the forgotten present. It is territorial without necessarily
taking up physical space. This vanishing mise-en-scène in the city is a contemporary
urban strategy that is akin to the theatrical, and hence an event I would like to call
an “urban dramaturgy.” By scripting a role for participants via mediated perfor-
mance strategies and digital technological advances, Inside Out incites new kinds of
audience participation within the city and blurs the lines between actor/audience
(agent/subject). By the term “urban” I mean it not only as a spatial term but also
as a process and concept that implies human rights, as explicitly stated with The
Right to the City Alliance, a movement officially founded at the first United States
Social Forum. The mission (as found in the Website www.righttothecity.org) reads:
24 PAJ 102
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Right to the City Alliance was born . . . out of the power of an idea of a
new kind of urban politics that asserts that everyone, particularly the disen-
franchised, not only has a right to the city, but as inhabitants, have a right
to shape it, design it, and operationalize an urban human rights agenda.
What the city has come to represent (alimento, agua, shelter, job security, salud) is not
a privilege, but a right. As David Harvey argues in his “Right to the City” manifesto,
urbanization is and has always been a class phenomenon. “The question of what kind
of city we want,” he declares, “cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social
corbatas, relationship to nature, lifestyles, tecnologías, and aesthetic values we desire.”9
This is the new “urban” I wish to engage with in contextualizing Inside Out’s medi-
ated performance practice. I add “dramaturgy” to this term since with it I refer to
the possibility that stories can be told from different perspectives, that composition
in a given context renders meaning through interpretation, and that imagination
renders something real. “Dramaturgy” also connotes narrative (not necessarily a
linear one), which is essential in establishing what story we want to tell, for whom,
and by whom. Inside Out’s urban dramaturgy plays with the structure, ritmo, y
flow of the city, via mediated performance practices, to enact new stories of what
our cities are and for whom.
In Writings on Cities, as with many of his other works, Henri Lefebvre argues that
the very survival of capitalism is due to the creation of a carefully construed spa-
tialization, hidden from critical view. Intent on unveiling space’s inner logic and on
the potential influence of art in reshaping the urban (Lefebvre was part of Debord’s
Situationists early on), Lefebvre clarifies that “this does not mean to prettify urban
space with works of art, but leaving aside representation, ornamentation, and decora-
ción, art can become praxis and poiesis on a social scale.”10 Like Inside Out’s urban
dramaturgies—produced, consumed, and owned by the very people who create the
work—Lefebvre urged urban dwellers to make use of the city: to appropriate it by
re-creating existing space. In “Right to the City,” Harvey advances Lefebvre’s concept
as “far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: “it is a right to
change ourselves by changing the city.” He continues: “The freedom to make and
remake our cities and ourselves is . . . one of the most precious yet most neglected
of our human rights.” This desire to build another kind of world, including a differ-
ent kind of urban experience, is inherent in JR’s Inside Out through both mediated
performance strategies and the performance practices of media. What we see changes
our perception of the thing we are seeing. As JR himself notes: “To change the way
you see things is already to change things themselves.”
NOTES
1. Inside Out’s project Website is constantly changing, and this version was taken from
Enero 2012.
2. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Nueva York: Rout-
ledge, 2011), 45.
FERDMAN / Urban Dramaturgy 25
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3. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum 44
(Febrero 2006): 179.
4. Culturebulences, “Au delà du graffiti: rencontre avec JR, colleur d’affiches engages,"
Febrero 2011, m2jc2010.wordpress.com.
5. In Kibera, the JR Foundation has recovered 2,000 square meters of new rooftops to
further seal the community houses (with their own portraits). The book, Women are Heroes,
was distributed in Kibera and signed by the women of the project. As part of his large-
scale project in Providençia, JR founded Casa Amarela, a cultural center for children in the
heart of the favela. For this project, The Canon Group donated fifteen digital cameras and
a PIXMA printer.
6. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (Nueva York:
Mariner Books, 1977), 146.
7. According to the Website, Inside Out “is not sponsored by any brand.” In order to
fund the project, special TED limited edition lithographs are available for purchase, and/or
one can donate directly via Paypal on the web. In addition to the TED prize money, el
project is funded by The Sapling Foundation and Social Animals.
8. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Negro & Red, 1967), 121.
9. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September–October 2008).
10. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas
(Cambridge, MAMÁ: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 173.
BERTIE FERDMAN is a performance scholar and curator whose research
specialties are on site-specific theatre, urban performance practices, y
contemporary performance. She was the initiator of the two Site-Specific
Theatrical Performance Symposia at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
and is currently curating a performance and art festival exchange between
Marseille and Brooklyn: brklyn2mars. Her articles and reviews have appeared
in PAJ, Theatre Journal, Theater Survey (upcoming), Western European Stages,
and Theater (upcoming) for which she is guest editing a special issue on site-
specific theatre. She is Assistant Professor in the Speech, Comunicaciones,
and Theatre Arts department at the Borough of Manhattan Community
College, City University of New York.
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