Time in torsion

city and childhood through memory

Abstract

This essay investigates urban temporalities through the articulation of memory, childhood, and experience, questioning readings that understand the city solely under the logic of acceleration and linear time. Drawing on François Hartog (2013) and Milton Santos (2001), the city is approached in terms of specific regimes of temporalization and as a field of coexistence of distinct temporalities. Following Walter Benjamin (2013) and Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (1999, 2014), memory is understood as remembrance (rememoration) that reconfigures the past within the experience of the present. The argument unfolds through a pedagogical exercise conducted in an undergraduate course, in which students mobilized childhood memories of older individuals to investigate urban transformations through the creation of images. The analysis of these works highlights remembrance and graphic experimentation as modes of knowledge. Finally, based on Maurício de Abreu (1998) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2018), it is argued that memory and imagination constitute an articulated field of exploration and knowledge production through the sensible, enabling the apprehension of the city in its processual dimension and in the coexistence of multiple temporalities.