What is my role in the art practice?

My role is to think out the initial concept. My role evolves as the project progresses. It is to carry and develop the initial concept, listening to the team. My role is to not have the mastery of voice as my practice is essentially participative. However, I am not adopting the model of arts practice put forward by art historian Grant Kester, which proposes ‘the creative orchestration of dialogical exchange’ within a community, with the implication of transformational promise (Kester, 2004). Socially engaged art, dialogical aesthetic and relational aesthetic etc. won’t be explored in this blog and Bourriaud, Bishop, Kwon, Leeson, among others, have constructively critiqued these.

In addition, Voicing the Soil does not represent the participants aforementioned, in the sense of being their advocate. I do not aim to identify or resolve any conflicts (the conflicts that Chantal Mouffe believes to be inherent, hence her concept of agonism). I do not aim to synthesise participants’ views, or to draw conclusions from them. I simply intend to re-present them, through recording their knowledge and allowing that to inform the project.

While it is the aim of the project to raise awareness of how soil is created, it is not the aim of the project to educate. Educating the public on climate change is often based on the deficit model. This is a one-sided, top-down, binary system assuming two categories of people: the specialist and the public. It presumes that people are blank slates, uncritical non-agents. I prefer to think of the viewer as the author of their own story, free to draw their own conclusions and to decide for themselves the relationship between the different voices.