Listening to statues: clinical device, memory, and territorial listening in Marechal Deodoro Square

Abstract

This article analyzes Marechal Deodoro, located in the central region of São Paulo, and its monuments in connection with the listening of people experiencing homelessness. The aim of this paper is to investigate how memory and collective traumas inscribed in the statues reappear in the psychic experience of these subjects. The method consisted in creating a clinical device of territorial listening, carried out since 2020 by psychologists, students, and psychoanalysts-in-training through weekly actions in the square. The practice combines the distribution of donations with the offering of listening, inspired by free association and guided by the notion of territorial listening as an investigation into ways of inhabiting urban space. The results show that the monuments condense narratives of the slaveholding past, and that this traumatic return is actualized in the condition of homelessness, configuring a social symptom that can be subject to clinical elaboration.