Escapes into nature or green reclusion? Slacklining, non-urban imaginaries, and the potential of bodies in the city

Abstract

ABSTRACT As a result of ethnographic research, this contribution focuses on slacklining, highlighting the cultural feature of urban escapism in a renewed relationship with nature: practitioners consider slacklining a tool for a critique of the ‘modern life’ and urban rhythm. Undertaken far from green spaces, these activities represent a discontinuity with the urban dynamics. Outdoor activities respond to the planned division between productive/reproductive activities, and they are functional in a governmental rationale of bodies and the city. This ambiguity permits slacklining to explore the outdoors encounters, highlighting how the distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘natural’ sites poses the foundation of the normativity of performances, practices, subjects. In the entanglements of the nature-urban distinction, dynamics of power and resistance take shape in a continuous production of the urban space, highlighting the creative potential and limits of outdoor activities.