Socially engaged art proposals: between collaboration, affect, and the commons

Abstract

This paper presents some aspects of socially engaged art proposals, such as collaborative methods, affective relationships, and the production of the common. Currently, we observe in transdisciplinary projects and collective actions a growing focus on collaborative practices as attempts to go beyond practices strictly engrained in established institutional spaces such as museums, universities, and governmental or private spaces. With the perspective of a certain local activation of collective pieces of knowledge and practices, these artistic proposals aim at the circulation of knowledge, its integration and contamination by unusual places, narratives and methodologies belonging to each daily life. Therefore, we find in socially engaged artistic practices artistic interventions that highlight the power of affects for the production of knowledge managed in communities, making us think about what relationships consist of and how they may or may not give space for the common. We understand that by considering the power of affects and art in their political and social dimensions, we incorporate a discourse of difference that allows for other possible forms of communal living.