1.1 Introduction
The book Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City engages with practices of inquiry crafted at the intersection of art, theory and the city with the aim to explore and experiment with the relational, sensorial, material potentials of different places and spaces in cities across the world. We propose a journey through nine studies that use concepts and questions emerging from new materialisms, new empiricisms and posthumanist frameworks to consider life in the city as more-than-human and assembled. A central motivation of the book is to widen the imagination around urban life beyond neoliberal and colonial subjectivities and geographies. For this, we suggest a focus on the city as a territory of practice (Amin and Thrift 2017). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) noted that territories are different from a plan or a map because they resist abstraction. Territories are grounded in the earth and express ongoing movement, composition and flow. Territories encompass and provoke felt and embodied relationalities.
Thus, we propose approaching the city as a posthuman ecology (Bignall and Braidotti 2019), where things, systems and infrastructures have active powers to augment or decrease the capacities of bodies to move, connect, communicate, think. The city as a posthuman ecology could be thought of as a complex organism that expresses, senses, regulates and controls. In a posthumanist framework, places, things, systems are more than tools and contexts for human action. They are actants that function in relation to other actants creating trajectories and movements in the territory (Bennett 2010). In this posthuman landscape, we see contemporary arts-based research as carrying the potential for inserting virtual openings in the complex architectures, spaces, infrastructures and computational systems that make urban life take on specific forms. Artistic experiments could open the imagination for less passive ways of living with such systems and appropriate them to develop other ways of making with them. This can widen the participation in existing urban concerns such as housing, climate change, resource distribution, etc. (Corsín Jiménez 2014). It also can open a space for aesthetic play with things, places and technologies that allow experimenting with times and rhythms (De Freitas et al., 2020) as well as other exercises of re-spatialization that lead to the impossibility of being pinned down by the spatial, computational, managerial and mediatic designs of the neoliberal city.
In tune with these ideas, our book also recognizes and problematizes the city as a space where there are continued practices of erasure affecting the liveability of subaltern, Black and Brown geographies (McKittrick 2012). The city as a colonial neoliberal space categorizes as inhabitable the places of the poor, Black and Brown, so these could be subject to all sorts of interventions exercised from a distance. These are interventions that manipulate but do not feel the city (Simone 2019). To feel the city, one needs to be in the plane of territorial practices, where sensing, mattering and becoming in relation are important aesthetic, ethical and political acts for enacting experiments with modes of collective life that resist such de-humanizing and abstracting gestures. We explore how contemporary art-based research can cultivate such radical forms of inhabitation, movement, composition and re-spatialization.
1.2 A story to take perspective
In this section, we retell the infamous story of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ residency at the Department of Sanitation in New York City (DSNY). We do it in the sense that it helps to foreground the idea that collective life in the city could be creatively reinvented through an art practice that opens up and grapples with questions such as, how space is made, maintained and sensed in the city? And how spaces, materialities and bodies entangle in maintenance work? Prior to this residency, Ukeles had become known in the art world for developing the concept of Maintenance Art (1969). Maintenance Art linked practices of care, cleaning, maintenance and feminist politics with conceptual art, performance, documentation, site-specific interventions and collaborations with different institutions in the city, including the DSNY.
Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–1980) was one of Ukeles’ initial projects at the DSNY. In the course of 11 months, she shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers (popularly known as sanmen) and thanked them for their work. Maintenance Art turned away from the capitalist notion of doing something as connected to ideas of productivity and neoliberal performance and embraced a speculative notion of creativity, which assumed that there is something doing in the emergent and undecided socio-material processes of cleaning and managing detritus in the city (Manning et al. 2019). This something doing suggests that being in the midst of activities such as conversing, documenting, moving, mapping and performing tasks along sanitation workers can generate modes of sensation, attention, habituation and collective engagement (Manning and Massumi 2014). In turn, this can give form to new sensuous bodies and living styles alternative to the imaginaries and spatial behaviours regulated by the neoliberal and colonialist city.
One of Ukeles’ projects that better shows these notions of being amid things consisted in a series of maps based on travelling the city in garbage trucks through designated collection routes and times. In creating these maps, Ukeles learned about sanmen’s particular ways of feeling and envisioning the city while handling and moving around types of waste and pollutants encountered in these routes. She became attuned to and highly interested in sanmen’s techniques, knowledge and sensorium, and began exporting, experimenting and reconnecting these to new artwork.
Ballet Mécanique for Six Mechanical Sweepers (New York City Art Parade 1983) is possibly one of the most significant examples of how Ukeles adopted and experimented with maintenance techniques. It consists of a choreography that she designed in collaboration with six of the best DSNY sweeper drivers that she met and observed at the DSNY. It mixed concepts of time, movement, ensemble and grace taken from the realm of dance and performance art, with automotive sweeping techniques. The low-rated, invisible even annoying labour of sweeping the streets with a noisy vehicle is rendered as something wondrous, made different, choreographed and artful. This happens through the combination of modes, where choreography as an art concept combines with the dexterous sweeping techniques of the sanitation workers, dancing around iconic avenues and the background of Midtown Manhattan office buildings. In mixing and interpenetrating these different modes, artworks generate creative forces that redistribute the sensible and affective conditions of collective life in the city, showing that the continuous making of subjectivity is interconnected with the continuous making of the world (Ellsworth 2005). Concepts like Maintenance Art and Ukeles’ residence at the DSNY also evoke that being in common is not like being the same but “an active belief or ethic that our common being is never given or found but always in the making” (Rajchman 2000, 13). The relational and hybrid nature of the city, any city, provokes that this immanent process of making cannot be reduced to human or social attributes. On the contrary, urban objects, infrastructures and technologies “are the prosthetics that enable subjects to think, act, and feel” (Amin and Thrift 2017, 17; also see, Jacobs 2012).
The DSNY residence and Ukeles’ collaborations with sanmen is a good example of how art contributes to intensifying experiences around the city’s vital powers. It brings us to consider the city as a medium for art inquiry and speculative thinking (Rousell 2020). In what follows, we try to connect a theory of the city as a complex and agentive assemblage (Amin and Thrift 2017) with understandings of arts-based research as a speculative process of life inquiry (Manning and Massumi 2014).
1.3 For a new materialist posthumanist arts-based research
Our book is not the first source that addresses arts-based research from a new materialist posthumanist approach and with emphasis on place and space. We have been inspired by previous work that has connected with process-based philosophies including Whitehead (1978), Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994), Massumi (2002, 2011), Manning (2016, 2020), and Manning and Massumi (2014). This work puts posthuman ecological aesthetics (sensation, feeling, affect, relationality and the minor) at the centre of enquiry. Early on and informed by Massumi’s (2002) work on sensation, Ellsworth (2005) formulated a conceptualization of pedagogical inquiry focused on environmental aesthetics. She defined it as “the sensation of coming into relation with the outside world and to the other selves who inhabit and create that world with us” (117). Ellsworth questioned how pedagogical knowledge is tight “to cultural theory’s grid of knowledge already known” (120), affirming that such an approach is invalid when thinking in a learning self that is in motion. “The learning self when it is in the making no longer coincides with whatever previously constructed knowledge about the learner we might hold” (121). For the development of her theory, Ellsworth substantially drew on the occurrent arts, architecture and media, all forms of art that develop in the terrain of the city. She sustained that such art forms help to think in terms of bodies that are not fixed but who practice emplacement, inhabitation, construction and thereby make sense in movement and in relation to other bodies. Even more, Ellsworth noted how spatial and architectural arts offer possibilities to explore and experiment with “raw possibilities of movement and sensation that makes possible different corporealities to be expressed” (124).
Along with Ellsworth’s (2005) and Kruse and Ellsworth’s (2011) work, Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City connects and extends a body of arts-based research developed through the last decade in the fields of curriculum, pedagogy and social practice that attends to the sensuous, material, more-than-human dimensions of thought. It sees arts-based research as a process of collective experimentation, concerned with how encounters between philosophical concepts, art practices and everyday explorations can generate unanticipated and non-hegemonic relationalities. Additionally, this research has shown an interest in spatial and environmental practices connected to living inquiry (e.g. Irwin and de Cosson 2004), walking (e.g. Springgay 2011; Springgay and Truman 2017, 2019; Lee et al. 2019) and mapping (e.g. Powell 2010; Knight 2016; Rousell 2020) that, while not always engaging directly with the city, are relevant in developing research orientation towards posthuman ecologies.
We are also interested in how this body of research differentiates from the focus of conventional arts-based research on art experiences defined as something exclusively human; humanly created, humanly experienced and about human phenomena (Barone and Eisner 2012). Conventional arts-based research considers that there are aspects of reality that are hidden, and that arts-based research can unearth or make them more accessible (Leavy 2018). However, new materialists and posthumanist arts-based researchers have affirmed that such an approach runs the risk of oversimplifying the empirical potentiality of the arts. Rosiek (2018) sees arts-based research as not only centred on revealing how some discourses frame lifeworlds, but on how the “historical weight and momentum” (636) of existing discourses has material-affective agency. The world is discursive-material and the agency is not only human but things in the world are agents in the creation of realities (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010). Arts-based research can engage with historical weight through art practices that foster “the cultivation of receptivity to a phenomenon or experience, which brings with it a condition of vulnerability to being changed by it” (Rosiek 2018, 640).
For Mazzei (2020), cultivating such receptivity and openness to be changed involves thinking research beyond a logic of deconstruction grounded by humanism and dependent on phenomenological methods in which experience is always of a human subject and r...
