Aesthetic disruptions: Mobile audio-visual experiences from urban peripheries of Rio de Janeiro

This article focuses on the contemporary dissemination of audio-visual mobile technologies in Brazil, which interweave aesthetics, politics and culture. Signs of the phenomenon come from the do-it-yourself practices adopted in the daily lives of individuals and groups previously excluded from a broad access to cultural consumption and production. This new scenario happens as a result of the increasing embedding of mobile technologies in daily routines, and of the emergence of a networked culture that eradicates people’s dichotomous positions, such as transmitter/receptor, or active/passive. Based on concepts of heterotopia, we investigate a movement where cultural placements are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Our aim is to reflect on two issues: first, how audio-visual creation, through the propagation of mobile devices, becomes tactile material for anyone in urban slums and peripheral areas of Brazil; and second, the process of (self) creation that takes place through the engagement of these communities in film production. Based on the work of Jacques Rancière, we depart from the assumption that there is an equality postulated by art as the equal ability of anyone to experience any kind of life by exceeding the limits of what is expected of body, perception and affection.