Things for Politics' Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change

Introduction

THINGSTIGATE aims to theorize how aesthetic objects mediate sociopolitical transformation. In a world where affective imagination increasingly sways society and politics, it is urgent to grasp the link between imagination, emotions, and sociopolitical institutions.

Context of Socially Engaged Art

Art for social change, ‘socially engaged art’, is pertinent, but its theories now dwell on usefulness. Imbued in a post-object relational art tradition despite the material turn in humanities and social sciences, these theories overlook aesthetic objects’ role in social processes.

Objectives of THINGSTIGATE

Tackling this, THINGSTIGATE draws on empirical hypotheses to assess aesthetic objects as a pivot of imagination, emotions, and institutions. It extends aesthetic cosmopolitanism in confronting the imagined community of the nation-state as an institution.

Key Questions

• How do aesthetic objects behave in social relations?
• How do they instigate change through imagination?
• In what ways do they intervene in the nation-states’ institutionalizing paths?
• How can they transform the imaginaries of a specific nation-state, and of a world beyond the nation-states?

Methodology

The study’s novel interdisciplinary methodology dissects the making of sociopolitical cultures by empirically tracing socially engaged objects – physical and digital – while they are in action, via artistic practice-based research.

Framework Development

A posited framework will link imagination, institutions, and a relational objects typology distilled from major archives worldwide.

Fieldwork Streams

It is then tested in two quantitative and qualitative fieldwork streams:

1. Iterative – via Make Your Own Passport workshop series in highly diverse public spaces in Sweden, Italy, and the USA.
2. Longitudinal – via 1965 Setiap Hari, a transnational social media initiative for Indonesia.

Expected Impacts

The study’s impacts are manifold:

• It opens up a new, theoretically grounded methodological field of artistic practice-based research.
• It will advance the discourse on humans' relations with others in sociopolitical imagination and institution, a long debate since antiquity, in art and beyond.