Eskinita/Aléia: neoliberalism and alternative aesthetics in a Macau alleyway

In this visual essay, I explore the downhill alleyway of Patio da Cabaia in tourist-oriented Macau as a subaltern space and a space of the subaltern – a space under neoliberal aesthetic hegemony and a site for which alternative aesthetics manifest as tactics. Though only a brief visual ethnographic snapshot of one alleyway, I offer an exploration of the ways in which subaltern aesthetics can exist in the cracks of the creative city: a city which purports to encourage the thriving of the breadth of human imagination, but in practice still centres the capitalist economy and wealth generation, now with a ‘focus on leisure, entertainment, tourism, innovation, entrepreneurship, the arts’. I found that while bodies flow through the main streets primarily to stimulate Macau’s economy, smaller streams exist paralleling the alternative interests and cultures of those who chart and dwell in side streets, giving life to pathways that are not always for tourism, perhaps even preceding but presently also supporting them as labourers or as tourists themselves – just as consumerism supports labourers’ and tourists’ livelihoods and lifestyles. In urban spaces, therefore, alternative aesthetics could not exist without the activities of a commercialized, consumerist creative city. This co-dependency between the popular and the alternative demonstrates much of the contradiction and tension that underpins urban life as we know it: for the subaltern to exist, it must always do so within the hegemonic.