Visible is a research project and biennial award that aims to produce and sustain socially engaged artistic practices in a global context curated by Matteo Lucchetti and Judith Wielander.
Visible brings to light and gives strength to artistic actions which have a real capacity to experiment and produce visions that can have an impact on the social and cultural imagination of our contemporary world. What they find are artistic approaches that first and foremost question their own autonomous ability to act as conduits, in other words with the capacity to connect up different ‘worlds’, often through networks and alliances with territories, artists, thinkers, and public and private institutions. The areas of action and thought that are opened up by this form of action bring today’s economic and political decision-making models into serious question. The benefits are not those of self-referential actions in art-based contexts, for the target is the creation of alternative models of public action.
Processes in certain in-between areas thus come to light, bringing into question our perception of the visible and, as Rancière says, combining them with invisible elements and significance: ‘Artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds, and scales according to which we perceive the visible, and combine it with a specific invisible element and a specific meaning. Such strategies are intended to make the visible invisible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relationships between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated’.
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