“Cambiá el statu quo”: linguistic landscape and artivism in Córdoba (Argentina)

Abstract

This research aims to review some inscriptions and drawings found in the streets of the city of Córdoba, Argentina, with the purpose of investigating the intersection between two theoretical-methodological positions: linguistic landscape and artivism. The linguistic landscape involves street expressions that do not always present features of authorship or systematized writings within the framework of an institutionality (school, academy, among others) while at the same time they result in ways of characterizing a city by providing an identity that is always under construction and in progress. In this way, the linguistic landscape is presented as a possibility of carrying out – at the same time – analyzes linked to writing and space based on concrete interventions that provide a principle of reflection on what is written, political, local and global, among other relevant aspects. The present work raises the hypothesis that part of the linguistic landscape of the city is part of what is called “artivism”, that is, street interventions are aesthetic expressions of a militant art or come from a certain developed activism, in the cases that illustrate this research, in a political and ecological dimension.