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POETIC BOUNDARIES OF OPEN CITIES // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2019. Issue 1 (19). P. 32-43

The author argues that in order to fruitfully explore the city within the cultural-studies framework one must first accurately define the city as an object of knowledge, which only highlights the problematic nature of the boundaries of the city. The article foregrounds the key role of the cultural heteronomy of the city, which overrides its civilisational heteronomy. Culture, which the Polish culture scholar Stanisław Pietraszko understands as a way of being in accordance with values, is the determining factor in the identity of the city and is manifest in the openness and fluidity of its limits. Central thematic concern lies in literary “prostheses” of cities, which are needed in places inhabited by migrants, the colonized, “the subjects homesick” for “their” cities. Fiction and poetry bear a crucial ontological and axiological city-making responsibility, as demonstrated in the author’s previous studies on Quixotic La Mancha and re-confirmed in this paper on the example of the Latin American Amereida, a group of architects, poets and artists. The author examines their 1965 journey from Chile, called Travesía (The Crossing), whose aim was “poetic dwelling” in America. During the journey, they performed poetic acts referred to as phalènes, whose idea grew out from an earlier trip to Paris and urban poetic practices in Santiago de Chile. As the pampa and Patagonia became a symbol of absolute modernity, the realisation is prompted that the modernity of the city-text can be “re-written” onto a non-urbanised space. The article ends with a glimpse of the utopian Open City (Ciudad Abierta), which the Amereida founded on the Pacific coastal dunes in 1970 in order to live there, work and teach students of the Faculty of Architecture of the Catholic University of Valparaíso. The pursuits undertaken in the city show that what is poetic is “open,” long-lasting and communal.

Keywords: Amereida, the Open City (Ciudad Abierta), travesía, city, city limits / boundaries, modernity, culture, values, South America