Estrangement in the city. From urban shock to Situationist dérives

Abstract

The strange has always been present throughout history. Exploring the links between disciplines such as literature, cinema, art, sociology, etc. We place the concept of strangeness as a state that comes up: as an unforeseen event, as an effect of astonishment, and its derivations as the extraordinary, the rare, the sublime, the stranger, anomalies, random, etc. From strange wonder spaces, such as the Cabinets of Curiosities, Wonders Cameras and the Phantasmagorias linked to special effects, we will focus on estrangement in the context of the urban environment, represented by the flâneur as a distracted passer-by, by Situationists’ derives with utopian cities as New Babylon and their experimental cartographies and by cinematographic characters such Mr. Hulot, who construct poetic discourses on the estrangement of the everyday. Through them we will see how the city offers itself to us as the scene of events where the irruption of the strange in all its complexity is manifested.