Drafts in Action: Concepts and Practices of Artistic Intervention

This anthology presents and discusses current tools, methods, and analytical frameworks to address artistic interventions, taking a multidirectional approach that accounts for the positionality of perspectives and highlights the nondirectional formation of the interventions at hand.

How do practices of artistic intervention engage with conceptual frameworks, in particular when it comes to location, institutional context, and human and nonhuman relations? How is the tension between concepts and actions, and between programmatic ideas and practices, addressed in historical and theoretical debates around performative, participative, and intervening arts? And in what ways do these debates provide possible tools for the analysis of artistic intervention today?

This volume addresses the potentials and challenges of different forms of intervention at the intersection of activism and artistic fields and practices. The contributions, written by scholars from art history, sociology, and literary and performative studies as well as art practitioners, are present case studies that shed light on artistic practices that respond to geopolitical, sociocultural, and ecological crises, as well as on curatorial projects, the organization of collectives, and the role of institutions within the art field and academia. Individual contributions are accompanied by short interviews that give room to dialogues among the authors.