Reclaiming democratic (public) spaces through music. The case of Viaduto Santa Tereza in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

This chapter explores how cultural and artistic interventions in urban space can shape collective identities and create momentum for the political activism of social movements. In particular, it is claimed how sound and its effects on space can act as a medium for social transformation (Cox, 2011; Labelle, 2010), thereby engendering the power to reconfigure and repoliticise urban relations (Connor, 2004; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The role of emotions created in collective actions through artistic and cultural productions (like music and dance) are inaccurately underestimated, since they represent important means to reinforce a sense of solidarity with the group and shape a “collective identity” in common struggles (Brown, 2016). The chapter shows how music and sound operate in (re)creating space and place-making, not only as a dissenting voice in the urban landscape, but also by producing momentum for political activism, which is obtained together through contestation and the proposal of alternative ways of (re)creating new spaces. To this end I investigate artistic and cultural productions that are set in motion in order to challenge the status quo of institutional power. Music, in this context, is conceived as a universal vector allowing full sensory reappropriation propagating through space, boundless and undisciplined, dis- closing the city’s invisible “power borders” and producing change by bringing forth problems and opportunities that feed the need for discussion and compar- ison between different subjects (Dayrell, 2005; Lamotte, 2014; Leite, 2004).