“Estais haciendo el ridículo” (you are acting like fools): Overheard in Mataró, near Barcelona, 27th March 2007, while walking in a straight line with five other people, holding hands. Public art experiments have blossomed in the cities of the metropolitan region of Barcelona, Spain. This art has taken the form of sculptures or murals and also of participative research processes and site-specific projects. It is not only designed to embellish, but to have a social impact on the city by generating social events. I use the general term “public art” in reference to art practices that engage a general public outside of art institutions. (1)
However, the projects I discuss have specific characteristics that may not be present in all forms of public art. First, they are site-specific in the sense that they occur in a particular place and time. Second, they are research processes, borrowing methods and ideas from geography, anthropology, and the social sciences more broadly, including mapping practices, interviews, and ethnographic research. Third, this research is participative; the artists work with the population of the site in the production of local knowledge. Fourth, these research processes are tentative and experimental. This point may require further argumentation. George Marcus has defined experimental systems as: “systems of manipulation designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask. Experimentation as a machine for making the future has to engender unexpected events.” (Marcus 2010: 276). In these terms, Marcus identifies an overlap between scientific and artistic approaches to experimentation. In recent years, authors in science and technology studies like Bruno Latour have expanded the notion of experimentation to define social processes rather than knowledge sites (Latour 2011; Corsín Jiménez 2014: 384). Experimentation as a social process does not only involve experts but also lay people. These new “collective experiments” are happening outside the traditional laboratories, in public settings, and are participatory (Latour 2011). Public art experiments are one example of collective experiments. This leads to a fifth and more general characteristic of these projects: they aim to have a social impact, to generate unexpected social and political events, and to help envision different social and political futures. The idea is that public art experiments can open a utopian space of social and political possibility (Bourriaud 2002; Zebracki et al. 2010).