Public collective creations open to 'everybody': unfamiliar connectivity vis à vis conflict, crisis and war

The paper investigates collective creations in the public sphere that provide an opportunity for “everybody” to join in and to become part of the aesthetic figuration emerging through such a collaborative practice. It deals with “sculptures” understood in a broader sense – i.e. including for example collective films, mosaic films, collaborative internet-appearances and flash mobs besides public sculptures in a more narrow sense. The paper presents particular case studies and examples of public art in various European countries since the 1990s and shows how they emerge as part of transnational networks and in a trans-media way but are sometime also used for the re-creation of particularistic presences and for creating demarcations. In asking how public collective artistic intervention can be conceptualised vis à vis à vis more recent transformations of antagonistic conflicts on a global scale and local outbreaks of crisis and war the paper refers to aesthetic theories of connectedness and relationality as well as to philosophical conceptions of “becoming everybody” – which have both emerged in a particular prolific way in the last decades. It discusses such conceptions comparatively and in terms of genealogy and gives particular attention to highlighting the ambivalent aesthetic potentialities of the unfamiliar (or of difference) in relation to public collective aesthetic creations. In addition, the paper focuses on the change in the aesthetic appearance of such practices in a long term perspective, i.e. it locates key examples in a widely back going history of constructing public collaborative artistic presence that began with the change towards potential republican or democratic political systems in the 18th and 19th centuries. With reference to the investigations of transformation in the realm of the political presented by Claude Lefort, it shows that in (potential or de facto) democratic societies there is an institutionalised dependence of the political on the people that puts “everybody” as a popularisation and motivating figure in the foreground of the public stage in particular way. This figure is in an aesthetic transformed way also frequently re-enacted and exhibited in artistic public appearances, especially in times of crisis and conflict, where groups are prone to becoming more preoccupied with each other. In this respect the paper investigates how reference to the everybody figure is represented in a postmodern global context, where the universalising function of this figure is being questioned in unprecedented ways, and looks at the more recent innovations in respect to this tradition.