Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Participatory art practices can be understood as one of the most radical lines that have been reached in Western art under the banner of transforming society and repairing the social bond, in ways that are possible thanks to the experiences left by conceptualism, site-specific, activism, public art, relational art, as well as the thinking and criticism that has been configured through the so-called social and ethical turn, or pedagogical art. In Spain and other southern European countries, participatory art practices are still marginal and often depend on the commitment of artists and activists; but this reality began to diversify especially in the early 2000s, when the process of democratic normalization initiated in the late 1970s was already some years old. Even so, the experience of The Pamplona Encounters (1972) should be pointed out as an important reference for the inclusion of the participatory practices and experimentation. That international festival was centered on the idea of dissolving art into life through citizen participation, with an ephemeral, processual and subversive character in relation to the established order in the last years of the dictatorship. This paper is part of a doctoral thesis that focuses on the effects of cultural policies that have been implemented in recent years in Spain, the causes and peculiarities of the emergence of the collaborative and its derivation in the participatory, the reception of these artistic practices, the attention to participatory art practices that begins to manifest itself in the curatorship of art, among other issues of interest.