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A march of protesters through the streets. A panoply of rigid banners and fabrics that do not move, or that have moved and been covered, frozen. There is no registration. The group does not chant any slogan. The route is unpredictable. The city may well be its own. Contained expression. Collective demonstration.

Demonstrations understood as public gatherings and marches of individuals that form a more or less homogeneous collective unit based on ideological slogans, a political and social affiliation to a group or a circumstantial agreement, constitute a common phenomenon in the our urban landscape and a recurring picture within the citizen’s memory. The right to demonstrate is enshrined in any society that wants to present itself as truly democratic. These more or less organized marches occupy the public space in a previously agreed way or not and autonomously express a certain strategy of territorialization of the urban landscape, codifying their possible itineraries based on their own paraphernalia and liturgies.

In short, we can understand the manifestations as a symptom of citizen power and will, an expression of awareness of the collective social role and externalization of real ownership of public space.

However, manifestations as a representation and form of a desire for collective expression cannot be detached from the proclamations, slogans and ideals that underpin them. The populist use and appropriation of this urban strategy by those who have historically never relied on its social functionality make a poetic revision relevant to the reactivation of its initial insurgent value.

The project proposes a first phase of documentation, design and organization of a civic event as an artistic action. A second phase consisting of the specific production of the specific elements that are carried during this (the protesters march along a route designed based on their visual and conceptual significance, carrying sculptures of white banners without inscriptions, “frozen banners” made with solid material). Third, the specific realization of the event with its corresponding episodes. Finally, the last phase of the project consists of the video recording of the event to produce an autonomous work that goes beyond the mere documentation of the action to generate its own narrative structure.

Attendees to the call for this demonstration put themselves at the service of a poetic use of the form, paraphernalia and liturgy of the demonstration and at the same time become participating actors and co-authors of the play.