TRANSART. Transactions, Transferences and Transitions in Participatory Art

Abstract

This article centres on the exchange of necessities, projections, ways of behaving and of establishing relations, of people involved in participatory art projects and collective artistic practices. For that, we explore how these exchanges happen, thinking about the transactions (from the point of view of the Transactional Analysis), the transferences and counter transferences (from Freudian Psychoanalysis), the concept of “habitus” (of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology) and the transitional phenomena (from Donald W. Winnicott’s theory). We cross these concepts with the artistic fact andspecifically with ways of doing art usually appointed under labels such as Participatory Art, Collaborative Art, Relational Art, Dialogical Art, Community Art, Social Engaged Art, Artivism, New Genre Public Art and Useful Art. We pay attention to artistic practices that specifically put the focusof interest on exploring different possibilities of sociability that let people and collectives make transitions (ideological, practical, emotional, material, relational ones…) from one situation or position to another. We call “Transart” to this kind of artistic practice that works under the idea that art isa human creation that experiment with ways of exchange, that facilitate transits and that can contribute to processes of transformation.