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On the occasion of the upcoming 25th anniversary of the collective book Modos de hacer: Arte crítico, esfera pública y acción directa (Salamanca, 2001), AusArt would like to pay tribute to it with a monographic issue that seeks to explore the intersections between critical art and the public sphere in a world of changing social and political dynamics. To this end, we have sought to bring together diverse voices and perspectives that propose an updated revision of the contents of Modos de hacer: to explore how critical art can influence the public sphere and foster a meaningful dialogue between art, culture and society.

Among the twelve articles that have passed the blind peer review, we find contributions that start from the generality of the landscape, through investigations that propose it as a space of resistance and reflection, where artistic production is linked to territorial research, as Mónica Martínez Bordiú does, taking as an example an independent project developed in the Montes de Toledo. The article by Ángel Manuel Rodríguez and Juan Bautista Peiró analyses the role of Infrastructures of Cultural Resistance (IRC) in the context of independent art in Spain. It starts from a theoretical framework based on the tactics of Michel de Certeau and the reflections developed in Modos de hacer, and uses as a case study the Córdova space in Barcelona, a non-profit project that manages to maintain an international and experimental programme in a precarious environment.

Delving into space, Claudia Gallart starts with a piece of urban furniture that has a strong sense of community in public space: the bench. Based on this element, she analyses different cultural strategies that have focused on building an urban space that facilitates interaction and neighbourly relations, looking at their methods, their objectives and their practices linked to collective ownership.

Closing the texts that raise questions about collectivity and space, Laura Luque and Carmen Moral reflect on how certain subversive artistic practices that used to take place in public space have been absorbed by the institutional. To this end, they tackle specific cases where the institution acts as a patron, transforming the public space into a tourist resource, for example; or where artistic or plastic practices that are illegal outside of it are accepted within the regulatory framework. In this way, we analyse how these practices modify the relationship between public space and citizenship, delving into how time changes perception and social dynamics.

Melina Ricca also investigates spaces, but in this case she does so on acoustic spaces within the framework of sound art and its transition towards the metaverse. Through this theoretical essay, she explores the dynamics that allow us to expand the limits of the acoustic, considering sound not only as a physical phenomenon, but also as an artistic gesture that transforms the spatial and temporal experience. The article concludes with a reflection on how these transformations impact on artistic creation and social interaction, suggesting that sound in the metaverse not only reproduces, but also generates new acoustic realities.

Political commitment and activism are the subject of research by Miguel Anxo Rodríguez, who analyses the derivatives of the crossover between political action and plastic experimentation and raises the necessary reflection on the critical evaluation of the reception of public art, on methodologies and the diversity of attitudes within the collective. In the same framework, Kankler tries to rethink the weapons of criticism, making visible the absences that, in the face of (in)direct expropriation, precarisation, the co-optation of critical practices and racisheteropatriarchal coloniality, seek the articulation of reconnections between the aesthetic and the political, cognitive processes and radical imagination, art and anti-colonial revolution.

Ramón Parramón also explores artistic practices based on the collective and the collaborative, where the interaction between the two concepts is approached as a complex, transdisciplinary and situated practice, crossed by notions such as cooperation, involvement, dissent, transformation, self-management and community action. It proposes a critical reading of collaborative processes as devices that influence cultural, institutional and social structures from a relational and affective approach.

Walking as an act of resistance, a practice derived from the avant-garde and consolidated by the situationists, is the action on which Leonardo Gómez and Alfredo Guillamón base their research on projects where collective effort and the metaphor of displacement acquire a critical sense. A context in which the art of walking does not respond to a utilitarian purpose, but vindicates the importance of the process over the result, where the transit is more important than the arrival.

Paz Tornero incorporates in her research on collaborative methodologies the scientific materials and procedures used in sound, visual and audiovisual installations, within the current known as Art, Science, Technology and Society (ACTS). To do so, he analyses the works derived from this practice, starting from encounters with scientists and reviewing the different experiments conducted in their laboratories, and questioning the figure of the artist in society, the objectual production of art and the art system and its institutions.

The articles that close this issue incorporate questions linked to gender and sexual identity into their research. Carmelo Gabaldón explores the relationship between queer video art and exile as a tool for community analysis and identity construction. The text analyses video art as a medium that allows for the resignification of personal and collective narratives, generating a community memory that makes marginalised histories visible. The research takes shape in the installation proposal ‘Tea Room’, which shows the testimonies of queer people who have lived experiences of forced displacement, both physical and symbolic, and is presented as an exercise in resistance, visibilisation and validation of dissident identities in the contemporary context.

Carlos Valverde and Laura González's research explores artistic censorship as a mechanism of domination that seeks to silence dissident voices and maintain a social order, especially in representations of the body that challenge norms of gender, sexuality and power. The body is conceptualised as a battleground where power struggles are articulated and made visible, and LGTBIQ+ practices challenge hegemonic representations through innovative visual codes. A case study of the Museum of Forbidden Art is presented, where, with a curatorial approach, visual strategies and the representation of corporeality in works by different artists are analysed. 

Igor Rezola Iztueta