Accompaniment: Unfolding Paths as a Work of Art
Co-participation, Artistic Processes as Alternative Models of Sociality
It is during the collaborations when artistic-curatorial practice faces a more radical challenge within the neighborhood environment and the inSite/Casa Gallina project itself. It includes the invitation to artists to immerse themselves in the neighborhood and unleash a two-way process with neighbors in a creative collaboration that lasts between one and three years, with curators accompanying that process.
What we recognize as co-participation is setting up of a collective knowledge experience of—a condition capable of managing itself as a social organ—and experienced as the implementation of a flow. The process in itself is articulated as the proliferation of a community-based situation, insofar as it is the metamorphosis of a node of social energy, activated by the group’s self-revelation. Curatorial accompaniment implies inducing a tacit model of a heuristic: a creative predisposition to the production of a situation of empathy. And whose presence, as the dense encryption of a human flow is [continually becomes transparent as] “the piece.”
Thus, these processes of collaborative art and social engagement require the subtle leadership of someone (an artist) capable of instigating a group situation of vulnerable permanence, whose traces of outsiderness would point to the creation of a—non-institutionalized—community belonging; capable of becoming the visualization of a face-to-face model of sociality in which we can recognize “the piece” as the result of a network of affections.
The gradual construction of meaning, inherent in artistic discourse—and whose resultant structure is legitimized as an autonomous language—entails, in the development of the co-participation, the filtering of another construction of (existential) meaning in the experience of its participants. And that other construction of meaning, that is non-artistic, is experienced as an empathetic catharsis, of a binding consciousness, underlying the group development of the collaboration. In each person, the collaborative process produces a spiritual revelation, of psychological and ethical re-focusing, within the community experience. The verification of a still possible other-self—not constrained or designed by the dispositions of capital—but now re-seen, empowered, and sheltered in the heart of the group, could perhaps be the clearest characteristic of social “commitment.” The resulting pieces, evolve, after inSite/Casa Gallina, in the art world, to then function as avatars of that extraordinary experience in sociality.
Osvaldo Sánchez
