IN-VISIBLES: some new strategies in art and activism

Abstract

In the contemporary imaginary, our common future is prefigured more
often as a dystopia – life in extreme conditions of oppression, vigilance,
deprivation – than as the utopian forms that stimulated the modernist
imagination. Here, we discuss whether art may work as a device of resistance at this awful perspective: which artistic gestures are capable of challenging our ways of life and modifying them. We analysed an experimental collection of aesthetic-political gestures such as urban interventions, happenings, installations and site-specific acts based on displacement that we designate under the sign of artivism developed in an open group of artistic-academic research. How can art stand out as an act of resistance in our “societé du spectacle” saturated by a normative media that controls our everyday conducts? How such experiences of urban art may displace the conventional actor-spectator expectations and introduce counter-conducts in the representational system?