Abstract

INFANTINO, Julieta. Arte y Transformación social. El aporte de artistas (circenses) en el diseño de políticas culturales urbanas. Cuad. Cent. Estud. Diseñ. Comun., Ensayos [online]. 2019, n.71, pp.72-88. ISSN 1853-3523.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18682/cdc.vi71.1068.

As part of a diversification of cultural policies, since the 1990s, albeit with greater intensity in 2000 in the Latin American context, a “new” area of (cultural) policies emerges proposing arts as a strategy for social transformation. In a significant number, this area was developed from proposals of artistic groups and community experiences that questioned and resignified hegemonic discourses about the social role of arts and their potential to creatively develop inclusive cultural policies. These proposals intended to struggle against urban segregation, stigmatization of vulnerable groups and unequal opportunities for access and participation in culture and arts, as part of a paradigm of participatory democracy, calling for the expansion of (cultural) rights.

In this paper I propose to analyse the role of (circus) artists -conformed now in organizations of the civil society and turned into activists, designers/managers/cultural workers-, in the critical proposal of alternatives against paradigms that have characterized the cultural policies. These paradigms have installed, among other things, culture as a “resource” to combat the undesirable effects of neoliberalism by promoting the social risk management often attributed to urban poor young people. The intention is to analyse options that face this rhetoric of control of the populations affected by neoliberal development through art and culture and who proclaim the design of redistributive strategies, anchored in a paradigm of rights, that dispute inequalities and guarantee equality in access, participation and urban cultural production.

Keywords : cultural policies; art and transformation field; social participation; policy design; circus art.

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