Call for paper: articles, reviews and collaborations for the other sections of the journal - Thematic Dossier: Interactive arts, artistic interactions

In his well-known book "Key Words", Raymond Williams (2007) presents an interesting conceptual mapping of the valences of the notion of “art”. He recalls that since the 13th century, the term could refer to any type of skill, a use that remains valid to this day. The specific meanings of art, however, have fluctuated over time: in the medieval period, the “liberal arts” included grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy; from the end of the 17th century onwards, the term began to refer to painting, drawing, engraving and sculpture and, subsequently, to the “fine arts”; in the mid-19th century, with the modern distinction between science and art, the artist began to distinguish himself from the scientist but also from the artisan, from the technical workers, industrialists and laborers and, in line with the avant-garde, he strove to distance himself from the bourgeoisie. In a similar perspective, anthropologist and literary critic James Clifford (1994) argues that an analysis of the history of anthropology and also of modern art provides privileged access to the transformations of Western subjectivity as well as the mutation of institutional, epistemological and disciplinary practices (Clifford, 1994; 2002). His well-known study of “ethnographic surrealism” used an expanded sense of the term to encompass an approach between diverse artists, scholars and intellectuals, dedicated to the analysis and production of art and culture with a special interest in otherness, in “exotic” practices, objects and artefacts and also in a certain “exoticism of the familiar”. Several other publications point to relations between art and otherness, with emphasis on criticisms of the fundamentally modern nature of knowledge about artistic practices and products originating from non-Western contexts promoted by North American anthropology from the 1970s onwards (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Clifford, 2002; Marcus and Myers, 1995; Marcus, 2004; Foster, 1995). Such discussions gave new impetus to audiovisual production (Mead, Bateson, 1942; Rouch, 2003) and precipitated literary (Geertz, 2009; Marcus and Cushman, 1982), performative (Turner, 1982, 1986; Bauman, 2014; Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Denzin, 2003) and artistic (Geertz, 2009; Marcus and Cushman, 1982) shifts in the field of art. multisensory (Feld, 2013; Elias 2019; Bezerra et. al., 2023) and curatorial (Sansi, 2020) approaches in the Human Sciences.

Although prominent figures in contemporary anthropology such as Tim Ingold (2016) have proposed abandoning ethnography due to its documentary commitment, the tendency of anthropology to reflect on the interactions and mutuality of interests between researchers and research subjects themselves offers a new, more experimental and relational way of producing knowledge about the arts based on the Human Sciences. In a recent article aimed at reflecting on “ethnographic experiments” in the field of education, Graziele Ramos Schweig (2023) proposes approaching collaboration with research subjects as an “intersubjective experience” that has a creative effect on the relationship between the bibliography and the material produced in the field; or even as an expansion of the possibilities of recording research data through graphics, images, drawings and multisensory supports. She emphasizes, therefore, that interaction with research subjects should also be configured “as a way of weaving relationships and participating in the creation of worlds” (Schweig, 2023, p.19). The author, who in her text invests in the proposal of the AND operating mode (Eugênio, Salgado, 2018) in a school context, records, as trends in these fields, interactive practices that involve embroidery (Pérez-Bustos; Choconta-Piraquive, 2018), designing artifacts in collaboration (Ingold; Gatt, 2013; Estalella; Criado, 2018), drawing (Kuschnir, 2016) or dancing (Dumit, 2019).

The present dossier INTERACTIVE ARTS, ARTISTIC INTERACTIONS aims, therefore, to echo such reflections and welcome proposals (i) for art studies involving artists, different media, supports and languages, creative processes and/or institutional articulations; (ii) reflections and proposals for interdisciplinary collaborations and experiments involving art, anthropology and other areas of the Human Sciences in their multiple possibilities, flows and exchanges; (iii) appropriations and uses of ethnographic and/or participatory approaches made by artists, scientists, educators and researchers in the Human Sciences.

Deadline: 15-08-2024