Drafts in Action: Concepts and Practices of Artistic Intervention

How do practices of artistic intervention engage with conceptual frameworks, in particular when it comes to location, institutional context, as well as human and non-human relations? What are the historical and theoretical references that fuel current approaches within the arts—performative, participatory, intervening—and in what ways do these references infer a certain tension between concepts and actions, between objectives and practices? 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, literary and performative studies as well as art practitioners, present case studies that shed light on artistic practices that respond to geopolitical, socio-cultural, 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.