MOBILIZING ART. AN INQUIRY ON THE ROLE OF ART IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF MACAO � MILANO
Creators: name: COSSU, ALBERTO
Publisher: name: Universit� degli Studi di Milano
Year: 2015

description: The connections between art and politics are multiple and are deeply rooted in modern history. These connections have led to the development of a lively debate in many academic as well as non-academic fields. Within this context, my thesis focuses on the specificities, the continuities and the ruptures produced by artists in the context of contemporary political mobilization. My overall framework is influenced by a cultural approach to social movements, organization studies, economic and urban sociology. Based on ethnography, my thesis applies three main research techniques (participant observation, semi-structured interviews, digital methods) to a specific case study: Macao, the New Centre for Arts, Culture and Research, in Milan, Italy. Established in May 2012, Macao is officially a part of the Italian network of ?Occupied Theatres? and, more informally, constitutes an important node in the international ?art activism? scene. Taking into account the global context of the early 2010s ? marked by the aftermath of economic crisis, the Arab revolutions and the Occupy/Indignados movement, and the re-emerging discourse on the role of electronic media in social movements ? my thesis, although focused on Macao in a micro-sociological perspective, attempts to draw connections and identify differences between ?artistic activism? and the prevalent trends in the recent wave of mobilization. In an attempt to contribute to the growing, but still limited, literature on art and social movements, my thesis considers Macao as an excellent prism through which to investigate the everyday political work carried out by artists in a context of mobilization. In doing so, my aim is to overcome the instrumental view that is often applied to art and aesthetics in the context of protest: seeing them as colorful tools to gain visibility and secure recruitment. In my work, I highlight how art might take unexpected forms in political activity, forms that are rarely embodied in the artifacts we are normally used to. In this sense, art is capable of running deep below the perceivable surface to connect and innervate the flows that circulate in a number of different media. The thesis is divided into two main parts: the first sets the frame in which I situate my work, introduces the debates around artists? political involvement (Ch. 1) and presents the methodological framework (Ch. 2). The second part is made up of three chapters that explore what I have come to identify as the main areas of Macao?s activity: action, relation and production. The first of these three chapters (Ch. 3) deals with the logic of action, in which I stress how an artistic sensitivity was deeply embedded in the first spectacular events that granted Macao a wide and favorable national and international exposure: what I have defined as an eventful logic. The second (Ch. 4) explores the theme of organization, a key area of political intervention of Macao activists, in which a reflexive desire for instability is coupled with a surprising efficiency and the inversion of the traditional equation for which organizational forms become transient configurations determined by the eventfulness of their routine activity. The third and final chapter (Ch. 5) investigates Macao?s models of artistic and cultural production. The case is explored with the aim of understanding to what extent Macao, and more in general the global wave of art activism, constitutes an alternative to the neo-libel articulation of the creative city in Milan. On the one hand, I ask whether Macao is a political actor able to influence the local cultural policy and to what extent it is included in the urban governance of Milan. I argue that Macao not only is an actor included in the urban governance, but also it provides the city a different cultural offer, open to bottom-up processes. The three core chapters, although partially autonomous, present a fil rouge, which coincides with the hypothesis that a broader change in terms of social and economic critique is taking place at a global level. As processes like the ?eventification? and the ?brandization? of culture represent some of the most efficient capitalist devices they now come to be appropriated in critical terms by probably the most skilled and apt subjects for a change: artists, and, more generally, cultural workers. Often trained at prestigious education institutions within the creative industry, their critique deploys the knowledge they have paid to obtain, and attempts not just to antagonize but to create a real and viable alternative. In the conclusion, the different uses of art in mobilization, scattered around the whole thesis, are systematized.