The Question: How (from your experience and perspective) do artistic practices create public sphere?
MAX: We have been going around in circles trying to figure out how to approach this question. It is a very general question and we tend to work more from a micro-perspective. I guess the simple but unhelpful answer would be: it depends on many things! We are not artists so it makes us feel a little uncomfortable to in essence speak from that perspective, but there must be millions of ways that an artist could reflect such a question, each of which would entirely depend on their sensibility or, for example, where they are working. The practices might be something very direct and engaging in the manner of an activist, or comprise something more reflective and narrated that deals in a more poetic way within a context. There are many kinds of levels of intentionality and sensibility coming to play.
MARIANA: I think there is no one simple answer that any artist would be able to give. Different artists would have entirely different answers depending on the context. One artist could have a specific line of research that had been defined in their previous careers, but maybe then respond in a very different way given another context. So I think it would depend on many factors. Obviously the geographical context is fundamental, as well as the financial context that would make a particular project possible. The multiple agents that are in play within that, the manner of the invitation to the artist, the timescales that the artist is able to work with, the structure of resources that are available – not just financial but also informative resources, social resources – all create a kind of “big umbrella” under which the particular dynamic of an art project takes place. And obviously different countries would have very different impacts on this. Likewise, a project that is taking place in a rural context is not the same as compared to one taking place in a city context. That is a very obvious example, but also different countries would have different politics about what public space is, and understand politics and traditions differently. In Colombia, let’s say, the climate would allow for a kind of public space to be possible that in Finland, just because of very obviously different climate conditions, would make an artist approach their project in a completely different way. Sometimes art would have to take a very specific approach to the public sphere just because of how people in a particular society occupy public space. MAX: I guess also the question suggests a kind of ontological framework in the sense that “creation” would suggest something which wasn’t there before – a kind of coming into being of public sphere. We would be more of the opinion that public space already exists to one degree or another. The question is which public sphere? Which sphere would an artist be interested in investigating? It could be a very small community of specialist knowledge or a much more open discourse. There are different scales at play and that is also very much a matter of the approach and the interests of any artist.
MARIANA: Another way of answering would be from our perspective and our own experience. We have worked with several artists over the last ten years, and I guess that one could perceived a certain “Latitudes sensibility”: artists who work in a process-based way, and that are especially aware of context, of the time in history that they are in, or are looking at a legacy of practices such as Land Art, or microhistory, as Max mentioned at the beginning. That kind of artistic practice is attractive to us – “slow research” and context-specific practices that relate to particular instances in time or something specific about a geographical situation. Something that we are more and more attracted by is artists who work slowly. Slow is good!