Spatial Practices in the City: The Kidnapping of an Arts Organization

Abstract Spatial practices and resistance processes play an important role in the organization of a city. In this context, we propose a study aimed at understanding the spatial practices of ruptures imbricated in the process of resistance manifested in the kidnapping of an arts organization, the April Exhibition (Salão de Abril), which is the most important art exhibition in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil. To this purpose, we used a mobile ethnography approach to single out some of the spatial practices regarding the arts organization under study. The main results reveal a network of rupture practices, which is intertwined with resistance processes in a dynamic of constitutive mutuality. This network highlights the kidnapping as a bridge to reach and include different spaces of the city that had not been practiced by the former organizers. Thus, the research contributes to an enlargement of the interlaced debate of practices, space, ruptures and resistance in the contexts of the city organizing and the Management and Organizational Studies.