Mediating Provisional Communities: the production and management of collaborative arts projects and their afterlife

  • Rui Goncalves Cepeda

Student thesis: Phd

Abstract

Through this practice research, I argue that collaborative art practices contribute to the existence of cultural democracy in a community. Active participation in collaborative art projects [CAPs] gives the community the ability to express itself publicly and the confidence to have an active voice as citizens in decision-making in matters that are of concern in the public sphere. Collaborative art practices exist when the visitor, who now has become an active participant, "shares responsibilities for developing the structure and content of the work in collaboration and direct dialogue with the artist" (Helguera, 2011, p. 15). The research draws on my practice as founder and director of the Trienal, a transcultural festival in Portugal that commissioned and presented CAPs, producing durational artworks which worked with and in regional communities and places. The festival existed by appealing to specific communities and cultures in a creative and improvisational manner (Kester, 2011). I critically examine in detail the production, delivery and afterlife of two specific commissioned artworks, which involved active participation in the collaborative realisation of an aesthetic experience: Tatsumi Oritmoto's Almoco com 500 Avo's and Santiago Morilla's No Veo Nada. The research asks the following questions: - How do collaborative art practices and the artworks produced support cultural democracy in communities? - What is the role of the arts manager, and how can we conceive of the specific relations and conditions for production that they should support in order to realise cultural democracy? - How is the autonomy and authorship of the different parties participating in collaborative art projects positioned and defined? This thesis argues that the role of the art and cultural manager, as a producer of CAPs, is to assess situations that are affecting a particular community. In this thesis I develop the idea of terroir as a conceptual framework for art and cultural managers for the realisation of arts and cultural festival. It examines CAPs through the lens of relational mediation, to consider how arts management processes contribute to the ideas and creation of a disruptive space by assisting in the production of these artworks. Uniquely, it find that through processes of relational mediation which transform both social relations and narratives (Sanchez, 2018), arts managers mediate production and support the creation of 'provisional communities'. Such communities are given authority to present their own cultural values and attributes, as materials that then become part of the process of production, which further supports their representation and participation within the artworks. Furthermore, I consider how value is added to a non-objectified and non-commodified aesthetic and relational experience through the processes of documentation. These processes give CAPs an afterlife by transforming them into artefacts, complicating the ongoing recognition and representation both of the artist's authorship and the participation of provisional communities. The research aims to provide a unique framework to explore the understanding of the role of artistic and cultural managers and/or producers as mediators of artistic practices of a participatory nature. It offers a contribution to the field of inquiry that challenges the practices of participatory art in society while moving towards a notion of cultural democracy, and positions the art and cultural manager and/or producer as a key agent to promote social change and foster civic empowerment.
Date of Award1 Aug 2023
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • The University of Manchester
SupervisorAbi Gilmore (Supervisor) & Simon Parry (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • narrative mediation
  • transformative mediation
  • mediation
  • collaboration
  • management
  • cultural democracy
  • commodification

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