Cultivating Ongoingness Through Site-Specific Arts Research and Public Engagement

Abstract

In this article, I consider the contributions of projects in Latin America to the need “to think in the presence of ongoing facts of destruction”, and to imagine and design forms of “ongoingness” amid socioenvironmental challenges and conflicts. I focus on HAWAPI, Ensayos and EnlaceArq, three initiatives that have consolidated a decade of site-specific, practice research that departs from the arts to devise methods that bridge the arts, sciences, and communities to confront socioenvironmental pressures and enduring injustices caused by colonial legacies and continued extractivism. How does site-specific practice research seed and cultivate inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations around pressing socioenvironmental concerns affecting Latin America? How do projects establish critical relationships regarding the circulation of knowledges related to these issues and engage with diverse types of publics? And, insofar as the projects reviewed here often operate on the fringes of academia, what strengths and challenges does this generate for their sustainability over time and their impact on scholarly research, public conversations and the lives of specific communities?