Shapeshifting and Boundary Crossings of Socially Engaged Art

Abstract

Socially engaged art practices are understood to borrow from and overlap with several disciplinary territories, crossing over into contexts that, in the process of engaging in civic work and everyday actions, obscure their identity as art and aesthetic practices. The article examines the complications that result from co-existing in various ontological sets of properties, through the presentation of a socially engaged project rooted simultaneously in art, social work, education, and ethnography, and where the author acts and performs as an artist, scholar, and facilitator. Participants in the project embody multiple identities which are dependent on changing perspectives and conditions. Arguing for a relevant ethical orientation to research adapted to the transdisciplinary positions of such community-based projects, the inquiry further interrogates the wrangle between the expectations that symbolic capital is typically accrued to artists engaged in these practices and the inconspicuous agency of quiet activism that offers potent alternative forms of resistance.

Making With Place

“…Such socially-engaged arts are increasingly exploring and theorising spaces, places, and landscapes as culturally constructed and contested (Badham, 2010;Helguera, 2011;Rose, 1997). Community arts, in public space, can inform how we create, investigate, and make place through the arts (Bourgault, 2022;Liodaki & Velegrakis, 2020;Loveless, 2019). Place and space are closely-related, intertwined ideas (Carter et al, 1993).…”

“…Art does not need to be flashy, monumental, or permanent to have an effect. A community that is able to imagine and make art together is already a community in change (Bourgault, 2022). To be making with denotes an engagement of mind, body, and social self (Yakamovich & Wright, 2021).…”