How to legitimise the participatory creation process
The participatory processes, so present in the concomitance of Legado Cuidado, are a challenge in themselves: how to connect the potential of artistic creation and freedom with the wishes and desires of the environment in which they are developed?
Participatory processes, which bring voices together, generate encounters in social environments and give responses to collective problems are a challenge in themselves. The dynamic of mediation that Concomitentes works with proposes an artistic intervention in a social context, thus seeking an interaction between art and society, to connect the potential of artistic creation and freedom with the wishes and desires of the environment in which they develop.
On this path, an arduous process full of doubts, the question arises: How can the decision to carry out an artistic intervention be legitimised? Interventions in public space usually arise as a result of a political decision. There is a legal legitimacy there, democratic processes delegate this power to the political power. The question is whether the political power, in addition to that legal authority, the power, has auctoritas, a moral authority that is based on the social recognition that underpins their decision-making.
Thus, in many cases, a prestigious artist is chosen, as it is considered that his or her career or intellectual capacity provides legitimacy. This would be a classic and legal version, but it has its allegations. The first is whether the political decision-maker has the capacity to make such a decision, How is it sustained? In order to dispel the doubt, a technical commission is usually created which, thanks to its expert knowledge and professional criteria, proposes a solution that is then validated by the political representative. Thus, we begin to broaden the decision-making framework; it is no longer just the politician, but now it is a small but broader group of experts.
Here, again, the question arises. In a demanding society, with democratic quality and critical awareness, a basic question arises as to whether such intervention in the public space is necessary, i.e. does it respond to a social need or to a citizen's desire? Or, on the contrary, it only contributes to the greater glory of the politician or the artist. This basic doubt demonstrates the need to delve into an initial desire that emerges from the social sphere, a primordial demand that drives the whole process.
When contemporary art calls for attention to be paid to the process, and not only to the result, it is because of this question. The process gives greater legitimacy to the results, how it opens up decision-making or how it subjects the devolution exercise to community debate.
«Art is a place for experimentation and for the exploration of devices with which to widen the possibility of listening».»
Mediation in the process is key, hence the importance of resourcing it financially and giving it the time it requires.
The political imagination is to broaden democracy, to make it more participatory, more inclusive.. Political participation is not only limited to the exercise of the vote every four years; there are multiple mechanisms, from associations and political militancy to the promotion of participatory processes. The panorama is broad, from working with small communities of stakeholders to promoting participatory action-research methodologies.
Activating the set of mechanisms for political participation endows the processes themselves with greater legitimacy. This dialectical process, with all the interlocking of interests and agents, is what legitimacy is based on, because the auctoritas is shared and everyone, from their own place and position, is jointly responsible for respecting the decision-making process and, above all, for taking care of what subsequently becomes a legacy.
The process is not free of tensions and doubts, there are no magic recipes and, for this reason, it is important to create spaces that help to share achievements and limitations.
«Concomitentes has been experimenting with these dialectical spaces from which to deepen a civic desire that sustains the artistic commission».»
The four concomitants are in this phase, there is a primordial commission resulting from a period of initial listening. This stage generates the basic foundations of the process, because it is here that we largely answer the reason for the intervention, which in this way is not imposed by individual will, but by a collective and shared will.
Each Concomitancia has explored a variety of mechanisms ranging from festivals, to the experimental design of a cultural product, to walking days or facilitated meetings. At the same time as these meeting and decision-making places were generated, negotiations were held with the institutional decision-makers in order to be able to materialise this commission.
In the specific case of #Legadocuidado, In the framework of the Pasatiempo Park in Betanzos (A Coruña), the process has been articulated from the question: can a city make an artistic commission, and under this premise the collective desire has been explored in the form of participatory research-action-research. It is therefore a question of combining different levels of listening and relating, in short, a multi-level governance that broadens the legitimacy of the process, while being aware that it will never be pure and free of conflicts.
Again, the power is there, in the conflict as an actuator of political imagination.
