Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

In recent years, many art practices develop at the intersection between the ‘social turn’ (Bishop, 2012) and the ‘spatial turn’ in the arts (Lehnert, 2011; Papastergiadis, 2010), with participation as a central constitutive element. Participatory art is quite often seen as a radical democratic practice (Kester, 2011), or as an answer to social alienation (Gruber, 2013) and polarization in the society, with a clear social goal (Bishop, 2012). But are these practices really democratic and pluralistic, or rather an instrument as part of a policy agenda, towards privatized public space, gentrification and consensual politics (Courage, 2017:24)? Discussions about inclusion and exclusion (Bell, 2017), cultural democratization versus democratization of culture, and between the individual and the collective are central in these practices (Deceur et al., 2016). In our presentation, we will explore how we can describe the social impact of participatory art practices in Flanders (Belgium). This should be understood as describing the individual and collective meaning-making processes of the practice instead of measuring assessments in terms of social effectivity. On the one hand, we focus on the socio-cultural processes, developed by artists together with participants, and on the other hand, we map the impact on the community and the broader society. In this research project, a multiple case study is set up, by using ethnographic research methods. In this presentation, we will present the provisional findings of the first part of the research, namely the results of the literature study and the first depth-interviews with key informants in the field.