Artistic Research, Experimentation and Cultural Sustainability in Chile and Sweden

Research Theme Summary

Arts and culture are two topics generally ignored in the discussions of sustainable development strategy. However, we would like to propose that Cultural Sustainability plays a far greater role in the life of societies than is usually described by activists and NGOs.

We propose that culture, through its artistic practice, engages in sustainable development, not only through the retention of folk-art practice, but paradoxically through the time-honored values of questioning tradition through syntactic experimentation. From our viewpoint, arts often serve to drive strategies by which culture informs and influences its citizens.

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Results

We have found that, unfortunately, globalization and the assimilation of artistic works as passive entertainment have a negative impact on artistic and cultural sensibility as powerful advertising through dominant media manufactures public tastes through an overwhelming need to conform to “riches” found within the center of the bell curve. This means that the art forms at the margins are rarely experienced, since homogeneity is achieved through repetition and conformity to middle of the road values, enabling a passive role of communities in the construction of social values and identities. It is to this extent that Artistic Research seems to be a relevant approach to address these issues. Deleuze and Guattari famously stated that art, science, and philosophy are the “three great forms of thought” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 197).

Philosophy thinks through the invention and development of concepts, science through the invention of functions or referential propositions, and art through the invention and construction of events and composite sensations (ibid.). All these modes of thinking share the inventive and experimental moment, the creation of something unprecedented that establishes new relations between materialities and forces. Artistic Research is the ideal place for merging and integrating different modes of thinking, including stimulating encounters between concepts, references, and sensations. Artistic Research’s inherent plurality of epistemologies and methodologies, channeled through the problematization of the artistic work, promise a productive field in which these encounters and extended understandings can happen.