My artistic and academic practice has evolved in the last 10 years framed by the development of public art practice in UK.
Throughout these 10 years, the fluctuating emphasis on ‘site-specificity’ has given way to many critical revisions of such a concept, brought about by economic, technological and social transformations.
The concept of place has also hovered in and out of vision and many terminologies have risen or fallen out of favour. To name but a few, New Genre Public Art, Socially Engaged artistic practice, Relational Art, Dialogical Art have all meant an increasing level of attention towards public art, whilst at the same time the increase in public art commissioning activities has sealed and institutionalised a nowadays evident alliance between urban development and cultural agencies.
Within such a contested as much as established territory however, I believe still exist concrete possibilities of exploring, revealing and debating social relations, paradoxes and dichotomies present in public life and its settings whilst directly confronting dangers of instrumentality and possible co-options of artistic practice by various other players or partners in urban development.
Each project is intended as an investigative action propelled by the need to present small but scaleable corrective elements within our contemporary social ecology, so heavily characterised by deceptions, entrapments and outdated rhetorics but also extreme potential for engagement, challenge and revision.
Alberto Duman
