Making society as art is made

A questionnaire to help us imagine the future.

We are witnessing a gigantic political and social experiment, the outcome of which no one knows. In the face of this general uncertainty, we consider that the best thing to do now is a exercise of collective self-reflection in order to take this impasse as an invitation to elucidate on possible futures. We propose to reflect on this with the help of this questionnaire on two fundamental questions that arise from this moment: what is important to me and what kind of world do we want to live in?

 Concomitant is due to the French project Nouveaux Commanditaires, which has as one of its slogans «Faire art comme on fait societé» [Make art as society is made].. When we founded Concomitentes in Spain, we adapted this insignia to indicate that ours is a project born from art, but which also has a clear social focus. This double objective accompanies us constantly. On the one hand, it works to establish contemporary art as an essential part of everyday life, but we are also interested in ensuring that our projects have a social utility, that they are developed in collaboration with civil society actors and that they take the public and social space as a stage.

What does a situation like the current emergency mean for a project like Concomitentes?

When we witness live and direct the collapse of our healthcare system, Doesn't it sound even frivolous to continue working on an artistic-social project with a group of nurses in an ICU? When we find ourselves confined to our homes for an indefinite period of time, can we continue to think about organising parties to «dance together» with a collective that, being high-risk, will surely have to remain much longer in confinement than the rest of the population? Should we continue to discuss the installation of a public artwork with the inhabitants of a village when they will surely soon have more pressing demands? Is now the time to focus on rethinking a university bookshop, when the entire education sector is facing a standstill of hitherto unimaginable dimensions?

 I think many of us have had similar thoughts in recent weeks about the social relevance of our professions. The sheer magnitude of the health crisis and the effort to contain the pandemic resizes any ambition. But as the days in quarantine progress, the sense of urgency is giving way to more leisurely reflections.

Gradually we begin to ask ourselves why this has happened, and where is the situation we find ourselves in today going to take us? And we see that, as serious as it is, the pandemic is not going to bring down our society, but that it does have the potential to accentuate the many other crises and debates we have become accustomed to living with in recent years.

We see that pandemic containment measures are accentuating the social divide. We see that the health emergency is partly due to the collapse of a public sector that in theory should be better equipped to deal with such problems. And we see that this health crisis is only the beginning of a larger economic, social and political crisis, which will undoubtedly increase the dispute over how to proceed as a society.

 Beyond our concrete projects, which for obvious reasons have now slowed down, we at Concomitentes want to contribute to this budding social debate. We propose to invert our motto «Making art as society is made» into «Making society as art is made».» in order to emphasise the innate capacity of art to reinvent itself and project itself into the future. With this idea in mind, we have designed a survey to propose a speculative exercise that makes us reflect on two fundamental questions: What is important to me? and What kind of society do I want to live in? We are not targeting a specific segment of the population. On the contrary, we believe that it is time to overcome ideas of social status and sectoralism. In the face of this crisis, we are all in the same situation of uncertainty and we have a unique opportunity as a society to take advantage of the transformative potential of this impasse and to re-imagine ourselves as a collective.