ABSTRACT
Shifting forms of participatory agency and strategies are emerging from street art scenes worldwide. A case in point is the Micro Galleries initiative, a nonprofit art endeavour, which since 2013 has diffused the genres of street art, participatory art, installation art and digital art. With a close analysis of their Festival in Jakarta in 2017, I will examine how the locally embedded, cross-cultural street art events in the urban public space foreground new methodological and theoretical challenges for the existing discourses and paradigms of participation in art. The Micro Galleries Festival reclaims the urban public space through simultaneous activities in everyday living environments and multidisciplinary co-creations between organizers, collaborators, artists on/off-site, volunteers, residents and visitors. This highlights not only intricate modalities and positionalities of participation that emerge from (un)planned collaborations and unexpected incidents but also a need to investigate them. My study is based on a longitudinal and interdisciplinary research approach and is inspired primarily by Irit Rogoff’s (2005) and Sruti Bala’s (2018) calls for a broader and a more detailed theorization of participation, extending it into the realms of visual culture and non-participation. Even in the face of contradictions and challenges, these kind of multimethod cross-cultural street art interventions hold the potential to expand the modes of participation beyond contemporary art into the spatio-aesthetic and sociopolitical conventions of the urban public space.
