Center for Getting Ugly is a pedagogical and artistic research initiative working across teaching, public walks, performance pedagogy, and collective inquiry. The Center assembles and activates a material archive focused on histories of collectivism that exist beyond and in opposition to the commodity form. Rather than treating the archive as static, it serves as a catalyst for gatherings, walks, performances, and discussions that generate knowledge-in-common.

Walking functions as a central method within the Center’s practice. Projects such as Walk to the Beach examine the limits of pedestrian movement in cities structured by automobility, relying on directions from passers-by whose mental maps resist the possibility of walking. Development Walk traces cycles of displacement and speculation between Tampa’s decommissioned train station and newly opened cruise ship terminal, guided by the knowledge of recently displaced residents and street vendors.

Exhibition-making is similarly reimagined as a social infrastructure. Common_places, a 24-hour-access exhibition at the Oliver Gallery (University of South Florida), operated as a shared space with a free library, reading and scanning stations, areas for sleeping, eating, and play, alongside discussions, meetings, screenings, workshops, pirate radio broadcasts, performances, and communal meals.

Since 2005, the Center for Getting Ugly has organized numerous public projects across the United States and Europe, including walking and listening projects, seminars, performances, counter-cartographies, and itinerant archives presented in galleries, universities, social spaces, and public sites. Collectively, these projects position pedagogy, movement, and shared use as tools for critically engaging urban space, labor, collaboration, and the politics of everyday life.

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Based on information provided by the Rozalinda Borcila website.