Visual Art and Social Change: Practices of Creative Subversion in the Public Discourse

Recent research has highlighted the performative nature of the arts and the social and cognitive effects of the arts for the identity formation, the body representation, the social transformation (Hennion, Grenier 2000; Tota, De Feo 2020) and the power of the arts on social structures (Gaupp et al. 2022) and in educational settings (Tota, De Feo 2022). Different forms of art, such as visual art on which this paper aims to focus, can become resources that people use in everyday life for constructing meanings and shaping social experience (DeNora 2011). Emphasis will be on “artivism”, i.e. the use of art to mobilise people and to express demands for social justice in the public sphere (Danko 2018; Trione 2022). Within this framework, this paper aims to explore the ways in which art - as arts-in-action (DeNora, Ansdell 2017) - can affect the public discourse. The focus will be on the relationship between artistic practices realised in the context of culture jamming and brandalism (Allgajer 2020; Lekakis 2017) and social imaginaries, with particular regard to the the role of art in shaping the collective imaginary of migration. Starting from this approach and using the methodology of qualitative interviews with Italian subvertising activists, we will discuss the capacities of artistic practices to turn into symbolic devices capable of challenging, for example, ethnic and gender stereotypical representations (Tota et al., 2023) and contributing to articulate concepts such as democracy, equality and social inclusion in the public discourse.