Pedaling Positionalities: Space, Practice, and Identity
This research combines urban studies, performance studies, and autoethnography to examine cycling in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, investigating complex relations between territory, movement, and belonging in the city. The text approaches urban cycling through Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “spatial practice,” situating it within the increasingly recognized field of practice-as-research. As such, it considers biking in the city as not only offering unique experiences in terms of autonomy, perspective, and access within urban spaces, but also as comprising the foundation for a research methodology in its own right. Drawing on the work of prominent Brazilian performance scholars Leda Maria Martins and Jota Mombaça, the text views cycling as an embodied practice, expressive of individual bodies within specific spaces, as well as a range of social formations, contested geographies, and forms of cultural memories.
The text utilizes an autoethnographic approach, examining specificities of individual biking experiences in Rio de Janeiro as a means of investigating broader issues, especially the city’s tremendous social and economic disparities. The author’s personal experiences as a white, foreign-born cyclist are by no means intended to be wholly representative of the vast array of experiences of other cyclists in the city. Instead, they are intended to explore specific positionalities, especially in light of recent “revitalization” programs that, in addition to making the city more bike-friendly, have resulted in large-scale acts of violent repression and in mass displacements affecting tens of thousands of primarily Black and economically marginalized city residents. The text wrestles with this apparent paradox: in Rio, the practice of cycling continues to allow unparalleled access to the city even as the discourse of cycling is utilized to make the city ever more segregated. Thus, biking in the city is not an escape route, but rather a direct path through Rio’s crushing inequalities.
raphi soifer (they/them) is a performer, researcher, and avid bike rider whose work explores memories, territories, and dreaming in city spaces. Borne and razed in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), raphi lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where they work as a researcher and translator, in addition to creating solo and collective street-based solo interventions.
raphi holds a BA in Theatre Studies and Anthropology from Yale University, an MA in Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense, a PhD in Urban Planning from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and an acute distrust of institutional credentials. Nevertheless, the strictures of late-stage capitalism, together with their love for pedagogical experimentation, has brought them to Universidade Federal Fluminense, Colby College, and the Bard Prison Initiative as a professor of Performance and Cultural Studies. raphi is currently a visiting post-doctoral scholar at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where they are writing a book on biking, collective memory, and identity in the context of contemporary discourses of so-called "revitalization."