Art and citizenship: Practices and discourses of young artivists in Portugal

ABSTRACT

The literature on youth and political participation has been increasingly paying attention to more alternative and non-institutional forms of engagement by that cohort. The growing detachment from the sphere of institutional participation is the other face of these trends which have been intensifying and are behind some authors' descriptions of young people as apathic and apolitical. In reality, young people think and act politically in fields where the private and public spheres mix, and which involve entertainment, leisure, and sociability. Outside the normative political sphere, based on an adult-centric world vision, young people construct new forms of intervention that spring from questioning the world, the exercise of power, and different forms of inequality. The artistic and creative practices have functioned as crucial devices for young people to secure a space in the public sphere. In this article we employ the term artivism to reflect on how they articulate this combination of art and civic intervention. It is based on a project developed in Portugal involving in-depth interviews with young people between 14 and 35 years who are involved in multiple causes. The analysis of their discourses allowed us to develop a typology of functions that are attributed to artivism.

KEYWORDS:

• Artivism
• youth
• political participation
• citizenship
• Portugal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Artcitizenship – Young people and the arts of citizenship: activism, participatory culture and creative practices.

2 The project anticipated an ethnographic approach involving field research and participant observation. The difficulties associated with the lockdown and the unpredictability of the situation, forced us to revise our methodological strategy. As a result, we decided interviews should become the focus of our project, even though we did not completely dispense with the ethnographic approach which was developed, essentially, in the early and final months of the project.

3 The use of visual methodologies, video in particular, led to the making of a web documentary with 27 episodes of approximately 3–5 min.

4 The project was meant to include workshops and artist residencies with young people. Given the difficulties involved in the period of the COVID pandemic, we had to limit this methodological approach to two workshops only.

5 Most of the ethnographic work and interviews was done by Alix Sarrouy. MAXQDA codification and analysis was done by Gabriela Leal, Alix Sarrouy, João Martins and myself, all members of the Artcitizenship project. The collective work carried out and the discussions with these colleagues were fundamental for the reflections put forth in this article.

6 All the names used in the article are pseudonyms.

7 Anonymised. It refers to an informal group of black women.

Additional information

Funding

This work is financed by national funds through FCT - – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., within the scope of the projects PTDC/SOC-SOC/28655/2017 and UIDB/04647/2020 of CICS.NOVA – Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa.