SMArt Talks: Contextual art. Practices and Experiments Across Europe in the 1970s

The lecture focuses on selected examples of experiments in across politically divided Europe during the 1970s from Debeusscher’s recent and ongoing research and publications. They include international encounters in Paris and Warsaw around the idea of ‚contextual art‘ formulated by Polish artist and theorist Jan Świdziński; the project ‚Une expérience socio-écologique‘ held in Neuenkirchen (West Germany), and ‚Operazione Arcevia,‘ an attempt at the artistic revitalization of a village affected by rural exodus in Italy. The lecture will discuss the implications of this particular approach and its relation to the notion of cultural decentralization, as well as possible variations related to the diverse geopolitical and cultural realities in which they took place. Debeusscher will also address the transposition of some of these projects to the exhibition format, as an indicator of the difficulty of circumventing institutional validation.