Counter City

If architecture is understood as a representational system, the metropolis emerges as one of its most pervasive expressions. As a form of representation shaped by the societies that construct it, the built environment embeds and consolidates their underlying social structures. In a Western context, where these structures are organised through systems of patriarchal power and control, the city becomes a primary site where gendered power relations are materially inscribed and spatially reproduced. It is within this critical framework that the group exhibition _Counter City_ situates itself. At a moment marked by the resurgence of far-right politics, of intensified violence within the public arena that further displaces already marginalised communities, the stakes of this spatial order are increasingly visible. Bringing together artists across generations, the exhibition presents practices that expose, unsettle and reconfigure these conditions. Informed by intersectional feminist thought—attentive to gender non-conformity, sexuality, race, and class — it proposes a provisional genealogy. What binds these positions is a shared impulse to reclaim space, to ‘counter’ the city as it is given, and to imagine it otherwise. Through acts of appropriation and disruption, the works presented construct a ‘counter city’: a space-time of subversion that contests the logics of capital accumulation, hierarchical planning, and patriarchal normativity that define the Western metropolis. Echoing the radical French group the Situationist International’s _dérive_ — a mode of accelerated, playful movement through urban space intended to fracture the linear logic of the capitalist city — they take hold of its streets with a sharp, satirical bite, working both within and against its structures.