City 01 Skate Days, 2019. Castillo de Santa Bárbara. Alicante. Spain. The Big Sun (El Gran Sol)

Today, street skateboarding has transformed from a subcultural pursuit to a mainstream urban endeavor, as more than 50 million people partake in the activity globally. Cities respond to skateboarders’ spatial movements with contradictory legal prescriptions and physical design barriers that deny a population their right to the city.

The intrinsic nature of skateboarding allows skateboarders to permeate everyday life, appropriate residual spaces oft-ignored by pedestrians and creatively perform reimaginations of architectural space. They congregate and perform purely to enjoy a space’s use value as opposed to its exchange value.

Quote. Christopher D. Giamarino. «The appropriative performance and social production of formal/informal socio-urban space: an ethnography of skateboarders and their resistance to spatial exclusion in Los Angeles», 2017

City 00Skate days (CSKD) is a project of great scope on the world of skateboarding, raised from a vision that tries to go beyond its sporting side. I focus attention on aspects that reflect a subcultural model, very diverse moments and contexts, attitudes and signs that tell us about that experience: fashion, graffiti, gestures, local environments, lifestyles, group interaction, youth and contemporary identities. But it also opens up to other perspectives: the visibility and roles of women in the world of skateboarding, the relationship between skate and social integration based on community actions, the practice of skate in developing countries, the reinterpretation of urban culture from the expressiveness of very different local identities.

City 00Skate days (CSKD) es un proyecto fotográfico sobre el mundo del skate, planteado desde una visión que intenta ir más allá de su vertiente deportiva. Centro la atención en aspectos que reflejan un modelo subcultural, momentos y contextos muy diversos, actitudes y signos que nos hablan de esa vivencia: moda, graffiti, gestos, entornos locales, estilos de vida, interacción grupal, identidades juveniles. Pero también se abre a otras perspectivas: la visibilidad y roles de la mujer en el mundo del skate, la relación entre el skate y la integración social a partir de acciones comunitarias, la práctica del skate en países en vías de desarrollo, la reinterpretación de la cultura urbana desde la expresividad de muy diversas identidades locales.