Urban jugglers and the narrative of a cultural city:

What do the traffic lights of Imperatriz-MA say?

Abstract

This article aims to reflect how the city of Imperatriz-MA can be narrated through the daily practices of jugglers at traffic lights. Following the bias of authors such as Agier (2011) and Certeau (2018) to analyze how such social actors “make” and “narrate” the city, demonstrating other possibilities that go beyond the capital-centric representations (ESCOBAR, 2005) of the city, so widespread by the social class. local business, with or without the support of a large part of the local intellectual class. Thus, through the observation of a set of situations linked to the traffic light and the itinerary of some members of the Circus Skills Troupe (THC), it was possible to characterize and perceive how power relations and techniques (MURA, 2017) are capillarized in several ways denoting tactics, on the one hand, and processes of invisibility of alterity, on the other. This field was based on photographic records, a daily insertion and dialogues developed over several situations that occurred from 2018 to the present day.