Art and Geographies of Engagement. Transformative Art as a Situated Problem

Transformative art, art forms focused to social commitment, are nowadays the subject of rich and complex debates. In this paper we review three key ideas about art and social engagement: its effectiveness to create collective agency and persuade broad audiences, the popularization of activist art through mobile phones and on line social networks, and its influence on specific contexts through the active participation of a specific community. To discuss dialectically these three ideas, we will introduce them as “theses” with their respective “antitheses”, outlining some of the critical reviews or questionings that these positions have arisen. However, we will discuss the universality of such questionings. Considering some interesting examples of Latin American engaged art, we conclude that the transformative possibilities of art is essentially a situated problem. In order to assess the meaning and scope of transformative art, it must be examined in relation to a specific context.