Introduction: Aesthetics and Politics of Street Arts Interventions

Abstract

Street arts interventions invade a public space, shake it up and disappear, but the memory of the disruption haunts the place for audiences who experience it. The artists seek to interrupt daily life, startle onlookers with an inversion of a familiar place and quotidian activities, and test the limits of what they can do in public and what they can encourage the public to do. The artists do not try to hide or erase the everyday world that encases their performance interventions. Instead, their participatory practices establish a dynamic experiential rapport with the audience in actual public spaces: an amalgamation of production, reception, and place. Here fiction does not work in opposition to reality; rather the imaginary re-frames, re-interprets, confuses, subverts or challenges notions of the real. This palimpsest of the world of imagination and the world of the everyday created by a street arts intervention works like a collage juxtaposing incongruous images, ideas or logics to construct new interpretations, and it uses the city as its medium and passers-by as its found objects. Street theatre does more than offer outdoor entertainment; it frames the public space and the everyday with art. As the boundaries between participation in a performance and participation in daily activities, between art and non-art, become porous, the public can experience a disorientation that often initiates reflection and a critical reassessment of the surrounding situation.