Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Interaction and Occupation

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Does participatory art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it Shifting the ground of this debate, which tends to assume one or other direction of influence, this innovative book explores the inherently dialectic relationship between society and the built environment. At the same time, it strives for a historically conscious discussion of a very contemporary issue. Chapters rethink the top-down model of participation and audience activation of high modernism, from Alexander Dorners immersive museum to Mies van der Rohes room(s) for play; investigate participation in spaces under political pressure, from exhibitions in bombed-out buildings in besieged Sarajevo (1992-5) to the art and organizing of revolution in Egypt (2012-13); draw historical parallels between modes of participation and the exercise of power that are seldom compared with one another, from sites of occupation in 1968 Mexico and 2011 Spain; finally creating links between cartography and feminism and between tourism and internet surveillance. With these juxtapositions of the aesthetic and the everyday, and the built and the mediated, new questions arise: is space formed once and for all, or is it the changeable product of changeable patterns of use Does the aesthetic always correspond to the political, or might an aesthetically authoritarian space be conducive to social justice In exploring these questions, this book looks at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimised or liberated from it.

Reviews

Marking out a knowingly complex field of contemporary scholarship on participation in art and architecture, this volume is testament not only to the multiple valences of the term artistic, social, political, civic, urban, economic, and more and the distinct contexts in which participatory acts and forms of agency have appeared or been strategically mobilized, but also of the terms rich and ongoing potential as a critical and artistic lens. Inviting us to continue to think through participation, it will be a welcome addition to contemporary debates on the ethical and political dimensions of art and architecture. * Felicity D Scott, Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture, Columbia University *
Intervening in vibrant debates on participation in the public sphere, Participation in Art and Architecture ranges widely over continents and cases: Sarajevo under siege, Sao Paulo between moving bodies and opened urbanism, the Acropolis and architectural erotics, Google Street View, Cairo, Mexico, and various European and American heterotopias. Tactics are examined in exhilarating historical detail, as theatrical and performative possession converts the spaces of the state into sites of contestation, and as design from the bottom up, immaterial labor, and theaters of memory are mobilized by users on the ground. This provocative collection hybridizes the disciplinary concerns of art and architecture, enriching them both. * Caroline A. Jones, Professor of Art History, History Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program, MIT School of Architecture and Planning *

Author Bio

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. He is the author of Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror (2013), and Montage and the Metropolis (2018). Mechtild Widrich is Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Widrich is the author of Performative Monuments (2014) and The Sites of History (2022).