Socially engaged art practices have been prominent in placemaking agendas and urban development schemas in the UK. Considering the increasing volume and visibility of such art in urban regeneration, it is not a surprise for it to be used as an example of art instrumentalised, often against its own rhetoric, for economic gain and the art-washing of community displacement. Socially engaged art has held a complex position within both the contemporary global city and the artworld. The constructed narratives of place and the empowerment, and the disempowerment, of its inhabitants are often entangled in such art. In acknowledging these are problematic sites to negotiate, this paper readdresses Rosi Braidotti’s ideas of the nomadic (2010; 2019) in relation to the curatorial, as a fundamentally collaborative and dialogical praxis, and explore strategies for socially engaged art that is entangled in urban regeneration. In reflecting on a large-scale art project in inner London, a socially engaged curatorial strategy will be presented, which attempts to work with communities to challenge placemaking agendas in creating small yet critical sites for narrative construction, discourse and exchange. These temporary sites can be conceived as ‘un-curated’ rather than spaces controlled by a curator as a mediator of civic and cultural engagement.
Contemporary art, in particular socially engaged practice, has a lot to offer anthropology as an interlocutor and collaborator. Investigations in the collaboration between artists and anthropologists have shown these potentialities (Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013; Gunn, 2009; Marcus; 2010; Ingold 2013). In line with this, this paper aims to contribute further to discourses surrounding fieldwork within art research and offers an insight to the narratives of marginalised communities displaced amongst the louder narratives of regeneration in the neoliberal city.
