If the strategy behind Post-it City has contributed to thinking about the various possible ways of approaching a research project based on the city as an issue of dominance, then that same strategy could be used to show the visual models of observers from the standpoint of their capacity for visual registration, but this is not exploited. Either way, the semantic condition continues to be a convincing argument when used as a model for approaching and monitoring the uses given to public spaces, so the explanatory diagram drawn up by the curators and their various collaborators around the world is an equally plausible way of mapping the signs left by the rhetoric of viewing a city as a single unit. Similarly, the condition of “social class” is something that the organizers are very familiar with, and they have to some extent shown the hazards of taking a privileged view on documenting, archiving and registering the transitory, or to use their own words, registering “what is disobedient”. Nevertheless, this begs the question: how does one document disobedience when the conditions of order, law, and legitimating lie at the center of this project and underline the invisible historical-political conditions of each city? How does one make sense of disobedience when the project’s discourse is framed in an obligatory disciplining prescribed by the globalized, progressive mission of the project?

Let us recall that it is precisely the microdata, the mnemonic devices of an exorbitant visuality, which make communicative codes more effective and information useful within the design of this globalized project. Thus, to what extent is Post-it City an aid to archiving practices and to what extent does it really subvert disciplining mechanisms and efforts to understand these temporarily coinciding spaces as homogenous, viewing them merely as something fleeting, like a glimpse, wandering around a city, or a quick browsing of the catalogue on global precarity? This is where Post-it Cities’ archaeology loses effect, not just in historiographic terms but in terms of its value as an archive, if we accept that what characterizes an archive is its condition as a secret, a secret that should in fact be shared, i.e., that should be revealed in order to exercise its ontological power and motivation. Doesn’t this exhibition reveal the secret condition of certain day-to-day specifics of the uses given to a city when such specifics, as we well know, are repressed by rational governance and the “this is the way it should be” approach behind the only possible city? Was it not Debord himself who noted that “the spectator can’t find his place anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere”?

Either way, the creators of this project seem to be aware of what we have pointed out, i.e., the political overtones implicit in mapping spaces for openly informal temporary occupation, in which it is possible to overemphasize on the one hand the esthetic fascination stemming from popular inventiveness, vernacular improvisation and the appropriation of objects designed with a different intention in mind. They seem equally aware of the dangers of being an observer-participant - but at the same time a distant observer - who selectively traces and indexes the violence exercised against people displaced by neoliberal economies, sexual marginalization and the deprivation of the most elementary rights through the domination of the more universal rights. In the final analysis, the danger lies in merely offering records such as subjective micropolitics within the new relational aesthetics, without distinguishing a space for mediation that the images circulating in Post-it Cities offer as a monitored, disciplined otherness within the spectacle.