The Art of (Re)-Assembling: Performing Democracy in and through Space

This chapter takes as its starting point the ascendant status of ‘recognition,’ ‘participation,’ and ‘visibility’ in contemporary artistic and cultural discourses. Foregrounding the pitfalls of visibility via cultural representation, it investigates artistic initiatives that construct material terrains and institutional arrangements where new political identities can be enacted and where new modalities of contingent and non-essential forms of being-in-common, beyond identitarian politics, can be performed. Drawing on relatively underexamined case studies of artistic initiatives that have emerged in Europe over the past decade, this chapter contributes to critical political theories and performance studies that engage with questions of space and institutionality by foregrounding the crucial role of architectural tools and artistic methodologies in the radical democratization of society.