Being-with: Access to Relation, Participation, and Togetherness in Contemporary Art

Being-with is an artistically based research project aimed at applying and studying participatory and relational practices within the arts as well as addressing the esthetical and ethical questions that such practices generate. The participants in Being-with – researchers and artists as well as children, parents, grandparents, siblings and other residents in the small town of Hovag in Norway – gathered weekly for half a year to experience how aesthetic production may interact with social space and vice versa. The article reflects on what consequences such interaction may have for the conception of art, and its arenas and agendas … when we consider art not only as a reflection of our lives, but also as an agent shaping our lives and changing the social surroundings we are part of. The article relates discourses of aesthetics penned by continental philosophers over the last 50 years to a specific setting in a Nordic contemporary art practice.