This book proposes an in-depth historical study of the artistic and political project of the Situationist International (1952-1972).

For two decades (1952-1972), the SI and the avant-garde groups from which it emerged (Internationale lettriste, MIBI), experimented the extension of the domain of artistic practice so that it could modify everyday life (construction of moving situations), beyond the separation into distinct practical, disciplinary or epistemological fields. Active in various countries, they criticized the institutionalization of art in their numerous publications and events, and supported all forms of struggle and resistance to the ideological and sensitive/sensorial hold of the “spectacle” on the lifestyles and imaginaries of post-war capitalist societies, marked by the wars of decolonization and the establishment of consumer society and cybernetics. Their artistic projects and achievements are catalogued, reconstructed, historicized and analyzed from the perspective of the “integral construction of the framework of life” referred to by the SI at the moment of its foundation, and always in connection with their famous critical stances on the art, culture and politics of their time. “Expériences” and accounts of experience on the urban terrain, maps, manifestos, magnetic recordings, radio broadcasts, films, collages, paintings, models, ambiences, situations, “actions” of institutional critique and detournements are all studied as situations in which language, bodies and human settings are mobilized in view of the collective production of “free” forms of life.