The Periphery as Center

Activist Tactics for Aesthetic-cultural Creation in Art, Fashion and Design

Abstract

The peripheries of Rio de Janeiro have historically been constituted as stigmatized territories, associated with marginality, precariousness, and disorder, resulting in the symbolic and aesthetic delegitimization of cultural productions developed in these spaces. In this context, the present study aims to propose activist tactics designed to enhance aesthetic-cultural productions created in peripheral contexts, enabling these territories to be understood as fields of creative, political, and aesthetic potential. The research adopts a descriptive, qualitative, and applied approach, grounded in bibliographic and documentary review, as well as fieldwork that includes interviews with Black and peripheral creatives from Rio de Janeiro. The results indicate that these tactics, shaped by activist foundations rooted in quilombismo, Afro-entrepreneurship, and cyberactivism, contribute to strengthening territory as a space for knowledge production and visual culture by articulating collectivity, economic autonomy, and symbolic struggle within creative fields. Thus, the study reaffirms peripheral territories as active centers of cultural, political, and aesthetic production, capable of advancing concrete challenges to the exclusionary structures that organize the fields of art, fashion, and design.