Rules of engagement: from toilets in Caracas to new media in new Delhi, Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga survey five recent art projects dedicated to social change through the creation of experimental communities

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Carlos Basualdo, Reinaldo Laddaga

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Similarly, beginning in 1993 in the Saint Pauli district of Hamburg, another hybrid project brought together a series of exhibitions, ongoing conversations, and celebrations in a mutually reinforcing circuit. That year, an alliance of neighborhood residents, musicians from the local Pudel Club, and squatters started a protest to keep the city government from giving private developers a vacant lot that was an important meeting place for different local populations. When some artists, including Christoph Schaffer, Cathy Skene, and later Margit Czenki, joined the effort, they formalized the complex multidisciplinary venture under the name "Park Fiction"--a phrase that referred to a famous Hamburg rave of the early '90s and that stressed the importance of imagination in effecting social change. Together they proposed an urban plan to the Hamburg city government, as well as a series of activities to be carried out jointly by the neighbors and the members of the group. These endeavors were aimed at giving form to the desires and collective knowledge of the Saint Pauli neighborhood while contributing to the creation of a community that depended on otherwise unlikely alliances. Some of the activities were topical, such as the workshops, tours, film screenings, and lectures that the group called "infotainment." Others were ongoing and took place daily at the vacant lot in a specially modified shipping container that housed the group's archives and communications media. A third initiative involved a touring exhibition, which appeared at the Vienna Kunstverein in 1999 and at Documenta 11 and will open at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville this May. There, documentation related to Park Fiction is shown in an installation designed by architect Gunther Greis that evokes the Constructivist language of the Soviet avant-garde. When the first phase of the park was finally built in September 2003, artist groups including Sarai and Argentina's Ala Plastica visited Hamburg for "Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space," a series of presentations that took place over several days and ended in a collective celebration.

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All of the artists discussed above have generated strategies that take up certain moments from the neo-avant-garde tradition and develop them in new ways. Their relationship with predecessors such as Joseph Beuys and the Situationists can be compared to that which exists between the political revolts of the 1960s and '70s and contemporary movements for global justice. While the former activists championed national or social liberation in the context of industrial capitalism and privileged a model of revolutionary transformation, the latter ones oppose the dominant neoliberal consensus by proposing to distribute common resources in the interests of "performance and survival rather than profit," to quote historian Immanuel Wallerstein. Analogously, if many socially engaged artists previously approached their work as a manifestation of pure matter or authentic experience, which often tended toward ritualism, the artists under consideration here reject such a model in favor of nonhierarchical collaborative production. They engage a parallel tradition including Helio Oiticica, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Smithson--all of whom viewed artistic practice less as a matter of executing an a priori plan than of responding directly to situations in the outside world beyond their immediate control.