The Curfew: Urban Rhythm, Sound and Poetics

My current research is interested in how urban life is reshaped and how attachments to the city unfold in the wake of interruptions to everyday life in the form of curfews. A curfew is typically seen as a legal, spatial, and temporal order that shuts down the bustling of movement and economic activities and turns cities into ghostly spaces of absence and emptiness. To be clear, I want to question this construction of emergency and emptiness, and to attend to who and what fill these construed times and spaces of absence during interruption. I rather ask what would an account of the city look like if it emerges from its moments of silence? How do affective lifeworld and political imaginaries unfold within an interruption of perceived normality? More specifically, in this presentation/paper, I focus on how art and creative practice signal towards an affective, rhythmic and even poetic infrastructure of the city. I draw on Lauren Berlant’s work to read infrastructure affectively, (and crucially: collectively, and politically). More importantly, I take my cue from looking at cinematic, and creative arts experiments from/on Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon that have touched on experiences of a curfew. My aim is to read those creative experiences that occur within or in the wake of “urban disruptions” with an attention to how they mobilise rhythm, silence, noise, i.e., the soundscape of the city into an affective account of disrupted urban life.