Whose Practice is it? Art as Experience

Barcelona Investigación Arte Creación, 2018

This article centres on the exchange of necessities, projections, ways of behaving and of establishing relations, of people involved in participatory art projects and collective artistic practices. For that, we explore how these exchanges happen, thinking about the transactions (from the point of view of the Transactional Analysis), the transferences and counter transferences (from Freudian Psychoanalysis), the concept of “habitus” (of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology) and the transitional phenomena (from Donald W. Winnicott’s theory). We cross these concepts with the artistic fact andspecifically with ways of doing art usually appointed under labels such as Participatory Art, Collaborative Art, Relational Art, Dialogical Art, Community Art, Social Engaged Art, Artivism, New Genre Public Art and Useful Art. We pay attention to artistic practices that specifically put the focusof interest on exploring different possibilities of sociability that let people and collectives make transitions ...

2012

In all its functions and possibilities art has the option to be more embedded in societies, in dealing with social and political issues, than ever before. For example, community art became a common art practice during the previous decennia: artists temporarily work within particular communities to create art together with participating citizens. Also in design and design research we see a growing use of participatory practices in which the knowledge, experience and creativity of community members are valued beyond inspiration. But how can artists deal with the notion of togetherness when they are outsiders to the communities they work with? How can they overcome the colonial us-and-them dichotomy that is still a common handicap in community art and in other forms of artistic participatory practice? This conference paper discusses which conditions can help in the creation of a temporarily 'we' during participatory practices. Anthropological approaches and design methods are brought together with self-discovered insights of the artist-writer, picked up during many years of participatory practice and her artistic PhD research involving Arctic indigenous communities.

Ethnologia Fennica

This article discusses the culture-making and place-making initiatives created at the intersection of ethnology and cultural anthropology, art and cultural politics. The focus is on the ways in which joint ethnological and artistic involvement can change the dynamics within the local community. As a case study the authors use the project Art in the Community: Redefining Heritage of the Association of Artists ‘Zemlja’ (Croatia, 2018 – 2020). The project was based on one of the most important episodes of socially and politically engaged artistic practices in Central Europe and Western Balkans: the legacy of the Association of Artists Zemlja (1929 – 1935), and naïve art and educational work of renowned painter Krsto Hegedušić. In the locality where they had worked and found inspiration – Hlebine – contemporary artists rethought their heritage and brought it to life through this project. The project was based on participatory approaches, artistic and community-empowering process that in...

Perspectives of Walking in Urban Art, 2019

This thesis has been developed with the main purpose of seeking a method that facilitates collaboration between the artist and the community within the creative process in Urban Art. Further, it has been considered essential, on the one hand, to defend the importance of observing and understanding the urban context in which the artistic work will be developed. On the other hand, it is also encouraged to provide people with a tool for gaining an awareness and appreciation for the aesthetic atmospheres that surrounds them, while they participate in the artistic process itself. To this end, a theoretical investigation has been carried out on the act of walking - a method studied over centuries as a technique of contemplation and meditation- as well as its role in contemporary art. Different artistic proposals in which walking has been performed in groups have also been studied. The research has so far been concluded with the analysis of a previous personal experience and with the realization of a co-creative walking project based on the studied concepts and referents. This involved various group experiments which were conducted inviting some inhabitants of the city of Dessau, Germany to take part. These experiences were accompanied by their respective interviews by the means of personal insights to be gathered.

Through the study of the artistic creation process, we can observe a close relationship between artistic production and its context, which performs the functions of perception, memory, imagination, creativity and expression. The development of creative activities, and the learning context where they are developed, is considered crucial for an analysis of the artistic research process. This paper seeks to address some of these themes found in José Paiva’s (2009) PhD thesis, which are revisited in my doctoral research entitled, The Biennial of Cerveira (1978-2007) – memory and uniqueness, developed at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Oporto in Portugal. The subject of my investigation is an analysis of procedures and methods of work of participating artists in the Bienal de Cerveira ateliers, workshops and symposia and their interaction with the visitors in Vila Nova de Cerveira to determine the added-value for the community as a stimulus for new knowledge in this context. My analysis will also focus on the most striking facts of the activity of the Cultural Association, PROJECTO-BIENAL DE CERVEIRA, as a resource for investigative artistic research. My methodological approach – narrative inquiry between Paiva’s reflection on experiences and the context of his activities – has allowed me to inquire into the aspects of developing artistic knowledge in interaction with others. Through the ethnographic approach, topics of knowledge become more alive, more sensory and more contextualized than abstract issues, because the former are more active and more attractive, as they are full of elements gathered throughout the observation of the artistic process. This research aims to contribute to an understanding of the added-value and importance of artistic actions managed through a private cultural organization in the community.

Performance Research, 2024

For artists and arts organisations, creative placemaking can be a process to use their artistic creativity with and for their communities, while policymakers often view it as a strategy to foster social cohesion and economic revitalisation through arts and culture. Researchers have tended to look at this process by highlighting either audience engagement or the role of the festivals and institutions involved. What has been lacking in the literature is a focus on the artists' voices on this process and case studies in towns and rural environments beyond cities. This article, written from the perspective of a practitioner, addresses these gaps and examines the contested values placed on a public-facing work in a small post-industrial town in northern England.

Constantly resisting time and space, performance is an art that historically spotlights the artist within a certain spatial and temporal frame (the here-and-now), in relation to an audience and a specific political, social and cultural context. By allowing the artist to be its first spectator and searching for a simultaneous exchange between performer and spectator, performance art proposes conditions of socialisation that challenge normative structures of power and spectatorship. Starting from an understanding of the artists as researchers working perceptually, reflexively and also qualitatively, this thesis explores the field of performance art and focuses on their relation to the artwork as intimate, subjective, and transformative. The core of my ethnographic fieldwork was developed between October and December 2014 within the frame of two international festivals based in Northern Italy (Turin and Venice) dedicated to the practice of performance art — torinoPERFORMANCEART and the Venice International Performance Art Week. A highly ethnographic, reflexive and subjective approach is combined with a diversified theoretical frame of reference. Phenomenology and embodiment as points of philosophical departure provide the necessary threshold to overcome the dualistic Cartesian subject widely questioned in performance art: a holistic approach to performance as a series of dialogical, relational, and transformative processes thus allows for deeper investigation on its practice and alternative understandings of its documentation. Contemporary art theories further expand the discussion of performance and tackle some of its critical points and enduring ambivalences. Intending to make a contribution to the already existing efforts of those anthropologists working at the crossroads between art and anthropology, as well as to welcome fruitful dialogues with the artists it engages, the attempt is to trespass fixed positions and binary pathways of thought by exploring the potentials of experience, its continuities and transformations that creatively involve and intersect ethnographies and artistic researches.

2016

This thesis provides a dialectical conception of relational aesthetics, the state of art given definition by Nicolas Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics (2002), by focusing on the ‘value form of participation’ and the ways in which this gets subsumed into capitalist circuits, to fit its purpose within ‘culture’. One of the original contributions of this research project within the field of political art, or art that aims to be political, is its in-depth critique of relational art’s political economy from the perspective of an engaged practice. The thesis also provides insights into the role of the curator as the interlocutor of this exchange. As part of this analysis I examine the changes in the formal character of this relation of domination, by analysing the ways in which the classic opposition between autonomous art and the culture industry has mutated today. The thesis supplements its Marxist analysis with Jacques Lacan’s theories of discourse to examine the particularities o...

Alteridades, 2009

estudoprévio: revista do centro de estudos de arquitectura,cidade e território da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, 2019

This special issue of the journal Estudo Prévio is the result of presentations, ideas and exchanges that took place during the 2018 conference "Art, Materiality and Representation" organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute in collaboration with the British Museum and the Department of Anthropology at SOAS in London. Though the organising institutions and the venues where historically loaded sites of anthropological legacy, the event attracted researchers, practitioners and activists from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplinary traditions: visual and performing artists, designers, museologists, curators, art historians, architects, urbanists, as well as anthropologists and those locating themselves in transitioning, often undefined domains.

This text wishes to contribute -through symbolic artistic practices-to what is considered as nomadic art, community art within the public sphere.

In this paper, the relations between Art, Urban Space and the City will be discussed. From these, I aim to understand how urban public space can be configured through the ways in which it connects with the city and the artistic field -namely in what concerns art in the public space.

Cadernos Brasileiros de Terapia Ocupacional, 2018

The population that finds on the streets an alternative for their own survival and for sorting out their identities, is marked by a number of disruptions and violation of rights, resulting in vulnerability processes and social disaffiliation, given the current socioeconomic conditions and the neoliberal rationality. There is a need of innovative work that can add different sectors and knowledge, which defend the strengthening of a support network and services that aims the enfranchisement of the individuals, promote social participation and respect their diversity. Therefore, it is reported the experience of an extension project that promoted creative strategies to operate with the homeless from an arts and culture perspective. In order to do so, the weekly activities workshops promoted experimentations for the participants, aiming to express their potentialities, from the themes and requests relevant to the group, producing art, dynamics, and products that reflected the culture of the streets. Sensitive displacements were produced, noticeable to those involved, making the participants protagonists of their own expressions. The encounters took on creative proportions and composed new experiences of occupational therapeutic formation and practices in the social field. In defense of respect, appreciation of the human dimensions and capacities, especially of the groups in a vulnerable situation, associated with actions that aim to promote and extend their human and social rights.