My transdisciplinary work combines performance, video and installation to explore from a social practice perspective issues of liminality, territory, and public space.
Art necessarily requires a public space. Without the existence of a public sphere there would be no art as a public discourse. Public space is key to the very possibility of existence of free speech, since one can only practice free speech in public space. The contemporary trends of progressive erosion and shrinking of public space, on the one hand through the metastasizing of commercial interests into public spaces, and on the other through the continuous intrusion of state surveillance and control in public space under the security paradigm, result in extremely negative effects to democracy.
The move to take art out of the galleries and museum and out in the streets, must go hand in hand with an attempt to get people out of the shopping malls and encourage them to become critical and active participants in public discourse. In this time of ubiquitous presence of the entertainment industry, artists must find uncommodified spaces and new ways for communication with the publics and their activation. the new economic practices of reappropriating and restructuring public space, coupled with the absence of a truly public sphere defined by critical dialogue, increase the necessity and the urgency for alternative discourses to the official one dominated by advertising. And this is where public art, of the activist or socially engaged type, can offer powerful resistance to the power structures, both through its critique of commercial abuse of public spaces as well as through refashioning the urban landscape beyond the old spatial hierarchies and segregation. In this, socially engaged public art comes close to realizing the ideal of public space –an arena where citizens organized in different publics and counterpublics meet to confront opposing values and expectations in public deliberation and discourse.
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The move to take art out of the galleries and museum and out in the streets, must go hand in hand with an attempt to get people out of the shopping malls and encourage them to become critical and active participants in public discourse. In this time of ubiquitous presence of the entertainment industry, artists must find uncommodified spaces and new ways for communication with the publics and their activation. the new economic practices of reappropriating and restructuring public space, coupled with the absence of a truly public sphere defined by critical dialogue, increase the necessity and the urgency for alternative discourses to the official one dominated by advertising. And this is where public art, of the activist or socially engaged type, can offer powerful resistance to the power structures, both through its critique of commercial abuse of public spaces as well as through refashioning the urban landscape beyond the old spatial hierarchies and segregation. In this, socially engaged public art comes close to realizing the ideal of public space –an arena where citizens organized in different publics and counterpublics meet to confront opposing values and expectations in public deliberation and discourse.
