Cultivating Communitarian Ecologies: Artistic Practices in Spaces of Social Struggle and Protest

Abstract

We live in a time in which the conceptions of citizenship, the State, the market, and representation have fallen into a crisis. Consequently, we can observe how the binding link between the people and their governments has been broken. The despair of not being able to discern a dignified future has exhorted a social uprising in which all kinds of manifestations can be found, these mainly in urban spaces, at times articulate to artistic and cultural experiences, which unite the protests in decentralized ways; not only emerging as demonstrations of disenchantment, frustration, and systemic collapse, nevertheless, in their becoming, they propose new paths of social construction. The article reflects on the operation of artistic and cultural practices and devices that have emerged in the current situation of the protests, as well as on the transformative political dimension involved in the analyzed experiences. For this purpose, the paper is divided into three parts: Questions, answers, and considerations. The first one analyzes questions raised in the actions of the protests; the second one evaluates responses generated from institutional and non-institutional fields of art, for which the studied examples are categorized in their capacity to re-formulate urgencies, alter paradigms, and metabolize their contexts; and the third one raises possibilities on how artistic and cultural experiences would have the capacity not only to visualize but also to promote the emergence of new communitarian ecologies, new forms of decentralized common reorganizations, by virtue of the encouragement around the cultivation of egalitarian communities.