Imaginaries of Value: Articulating, dis-articulating and re-articulating Site and Mobility in globalised art and design practices through their creative and administrative uses of paper

Members
Erling Björvingsson, Elena Raviola and Dave Beech (Chelsea)

Purpose
The purpose of this research environment is to investigate imaginaries of value in relation to what Anne Petersen (2017) calls "globalisation-from-above" of art and design. Building onTaylor’s (2007) work on social imaginaries, we explore how value is imagined, performed and given material form in the globalised world of art and design work, by focusing on paper as a creative and administrative material interface used to produce and circulate values, norms, ideas and practices. This will be done through two case themes titled Site and Mobility to reflect the two sides of globalised art and design, focused on both locally produced communal spaces, Living Labs, and the like, and the circulation, globally, of local and site-specific art and design.

Background
Globalisation of the arts, according to Lotte Philipsen (2008), can be categorised into institutional globalisation, discursive globalisation, and the curatorial ideal that favours global international art events, such as biennials and festivals. The same goes for globalisation of design, which as well includes international design research conferences and multinational companies. Noël Carroll (2007) argues that this has led to an integrated worldwide cosmopolitan institution of art and design favouring curatorial practices that call on trustworthy themes that circulate between large globalised art scenes. The artistic direction of Documenta 15 by the Jakarta-based art collective ruangrupa was a case in point, which focuses on “collectivity, communal resource sharing, and equal allocation.” In design, a pregnant sign of the “globalization-from-above” is the global spread of IDEO’s “Design Thinking” in a wide variety of sectors and countries as a universal guide for creativity and innovation to solve all sorts of issues, from manufacturing new products to organizing humanitarian initiatives.

Globalisation of art and design comprises two interrelated ways of circulation. Firstly, they make up a distinct global field and regime of practice consisting of artists and their work, critics, curators, collectors and researchers and their institutional affiliations that has for the last decades seen increased transculturation (Welsch 1999) and mobility of works of art and art professionals. These processes of transculturation and mobility have also implied revaluating and rethinking the labelling of non-Western art and artists where ethnicity is avoided and where such art is not seen to belong to imitative peripheries (Petersen 2017). Secondly, it is also made up of the circulation of creative practices in local sites, where collaborations, interventions and artistic expressions in local communal spaces, living labs, city development projects are curated to interact with the local culture they have been ‘parachuted’ into. Miwon Kwon (2002) has pointed out that site-specific creative practices have paradoxically led to intensely “nomadic” artistic practices in the form of cultural management, as artists engage in “one site after another” as pseudo-ethnographers and temporary in-house critics.

The global circulation of art and design practices have largely neglected the spatial, material and temporal dimensions of the norms, ideas and practices of value that global exhibitions or short-term art and design projects carry around and drop onto local communities. Such practices and their visual and material culture need therefore to be analysed, as argued by Caroline A. Jones (2004) by paying attention to the local and detailed aspects on transcultural intersections and dispersion of such work. This follows also Appadurai’s (2013) exhortation to look at both the circulation of forms and the forms of circulation by analytically and methodologically paying attention at the matter and ideas making up imaginaries of value, at their histories and geographies at the same time, at how materials, space and time demarcate, discriminate and orient who can say, make, hear and do what, where and when.

The focus in our research environment
In order to understand the imaginaries of value produced and performed in the globalised art and design world, we will engage our artistic research with the mundane material paper which is pervasively used in this world both creatively and administratively. The aims of this research environment are threefold:

• To understand how imaginaries of value are articulated and dis-articulated in site-specific art and design projects, by following the material paper;
• To understand how imaginaries of value are articulated and dis-articulated in globally circulating art and design projects by following the material paper;
• To rearticulate these imaginaries of value by ways of reframing through microhistories.
   

The researchers involved in the research environment analyse different cases around two themes: Site and Mobility. In each case, we identify, trace and analyse historically sedimented regimes of art and design practices and their material articulations through aesthetic and administrative work on paper with a focus on how such material manifestation simultaneously make and unmake value, connect and disconnect social relations. We aim thus at investigating “historically sedimented power imbalances and ideological. Paper is our guiding material in our fieldwork, where we look at its use in administrative and creative work. We for example collect and follow pre-project documents such as project applications, planning documents, projects recruitment briefs, and posters; workshop material such as post-it notes, paper scenarios, paper prototypes, and result documents such as how projects have been displayed and exhibited as well as disseminated through projects reports and scientific and popular science articles.

Significance
We critically highlight how specific imaginaries of value are articulated in the globalized world of contemporary art and design and how such material and practical articulations imply spatial and temporal dis-articulations of other historically sedimented imaginaries of value. The novelty is twofold: Firstly, the creative and analytical engagement with the pervasive yet invisible material paper and its role in producing and performing imaginaries of value; secondly, the exploration of critical connections between the local and the global in the circulation of such imaginaries.