Social Practice as Interventionist Pedagogy

This presentation explores participatory, public installations as interventionist sites of pedagogy. Works of social practice art and artistic intervention appropriate public or informal sites through creative, temporary projects that invite public engagement.

Drawing from three, participatory, public installations, the presenter will illustrate the potential for such social projects to be sites for informal art education and civic engagement. These three works were created by the presenter and live as large scale domestic rooms installed in outdoor spaces and public corridors. They call attention to issues of consumption, waste and material value by inviting participants to view a collection of discarded objects found in river and road ways, and then “adopt” one by giving it a name, place and date of birth, and writing its story.

The outdoor and public environments of the installations were chosen as a means to reach wide audiences; to open the space for unexpected relations with material objects and human participants and unsettle normalized consumption practices.

Through this presentation, I will discuss ways in which participatory installations such as these may create the “conditions of possibility” (Ingold, 2011) for new, renewed or unexpected encounters with material objects, human participants and public spaces. Through examples from these three projects, I will illustrate how such actions may act both as contemporary art practices and sites of “unintentional, involuntary learning” (Ellsworth, 2005). I will then open space to discuss the potential for performative contemporary art practices to engage diverse audiences with social concerns such as waste, consumption and sustainability.