Eventful Protests: The Chilean Uprising As an Aesthetic and Resonant Event
Building on Rancière's (2013a; 2013b) theories on aesthetics, my project argues that protests can be interpreted as aesthetic events that can disrupt the “politics of aesthetics”, altering the regime of thinking about arts, but so too, the “aesthetics of politics”, that is, the implicit organisation that governs the sensible order. These are events that challenge our perception by enabling the emergence of ‘impossible artists’ that, through acts of dissensus, enact the universal of politics according to which, despite the differences, ‘we are all equal’, by questioning dominant modes of hearing, but also by realising projected political futures while musicking.
Protests can also be interpreted as "resonant events", enabling us to examine the transformative power of music in making people resonate with each other, music, and history (Rosa, 2019). Music fostered a sonic solidarity capable of bringing together people who, despite not crossing their paths before, were all fighting (and singing) for the same thing. Further, my project suggests how music contributed to developing transhistorical solidarity, mobilising memories and making people resonate with past and future struggles.
By emphasising the idea of eventfulness, it seeks to explore the transformative effects of protests, which can be of particular relevance in contexts where, like the Chilean one, many institutional setbacks led to a general perception of failure. As aesthetic and resonant events, protests produced transformations beyond the institutional sphere, which impacted the "social realm", as Bayat (2020) would say.