In his 1908 book L’Esthétique des villes, Émile Magne writes: “A street, no matter how beautiful it may be, doesn’t make its existence manifest simply by virtue of its architecture. As an inert organism, it needs to be inhabited and criss-crossed if it is to acquire a soul. Then, as a reflection of humanity, it adopts within the human collectivity the attitude conferred by its inhabitants and passers-by.” As Magne sees it, this “soul of the street” is constituted by people, their objects and their cultural practices. This idea returns a century later, in 2010, when Luca Visconti and his collaborators pen the article Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the “Public” in Public Place: “The city is not only made up of people, of buildings, but of relationships between people and buildings, between people and walls, between the eyes of the people and our poetry.” Whereas Magne refers to the commercial activities that bring people together in the public space, Visconti et al. are specifically concerned street art as a form of artistic expression.

These two situations share what these writers call the inevitability of public space, that is, the fact that we cannot avoid the images with which public space is invested. By the same token, the quest for a larger audience led artists in the 1960s to leave behind gallery spaces for those of the streets. If urban art is at the core of our investigation of the ways in which public space has been occupied and transformed graphic satire, we also propose a wider temporal and thematic framework in order to place this enquiry into a broader historical structure. We identify three strands as starting points for proposals that may equally well cross aspects of each:

1/The street as physical surface for satirical production: Here, we are concerned with the street as a surface for graphic satire and the point of view of production. Walls, pavements, streetlamps, benches are so many sites for satirical expression, as are billboards, vitrines or newspaper-stands, or indeed an official project such as Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth.

2/Satirizing in the Street: Creation and popular gathering: The street is also seen as a site for ephemeral expressions, for demonstrations and protest signs. Luca Visconti et al. suggest that we replace the word space by place, a word whose French homonym place offers thought-provoking echoes (place, a public square; place, a position in a hierarchical sequence). This polysemic place is the site par excellence for public gatherings; it is occupied by a population that gives it its meaning. Here we can think of large-scale gatherings that are the occasion for the production of satirical imagery, from the nineteenth century (the carnival of Rio de Janeiro, for example) right through to the present (Québec’s 2012 Maple Spring/Printemps érable movement).

3/Transitioning towards a satirical heritage: By slightly inverting this logic, we are also interested in the gaze of the spectator and in the reception of this satirical imagery. Here, the street is understood as a site of transition; despite ourselves, we are caught up in a wide range of satirical and humorous images, so that new forms of consumption are created. What relationships are established between urban dwellers and these visual manifestations? How are we to make sense of the countless surfaces that are covered with unauthorized graphic interventions, furtive and ephemeral—which can eventually become reconstituted as documentary (and documented) traces in an Archive that might be material (or not), or that might be involuntary or indeed unstable?

Proposals, not exceeding 500 words and accompanied by a short biographical notice should be sent by June 30, 2016, to Aline dell’Orto (aline-dellorto at live.com) and Dominic Hardy (hardy.dominic at uqam.ca). The list of accepted proposals will be established in mid-September, with final texts to follow by February 15, 2017.