Cultural Labour and Social Awareness. How Arts Become Political – A Romanian and Moldavian Story

Subject of great political and theoretical support following the Russian Revolution in the 1920s and widely developed in the Western world ever since the Second World War, socially-conscious and socially-engaged arts (also known as social practice) have made their ways behind the former Iron Curtain under either new or rediscovered forms during the last 30 years, alongside their pandant, the political arts. While these artistic practices are known under a variety of names (participatory, collaborative, community-based, public art, etc., but also documentary-based, and, in the case of performative arts, theatre of the real – Martin, 2013), encompassing a variety of media, focus points and aesthetics, what all of them share is an interest in (collaborative) processes instead of products, in communitarian approaches, or in the reevaluation of the artist-spectator dynamics, and the use of a large and diverse set of sociological, anthropological and/or ethnographical tools (Bishop, 2012; Magris and Picon-Vallin, 2019). At the same time, artists working in social practice share a common believe in arts as instruments of social and political change, constantly negotiating between the aesthetical tradition and the utilitarian value of art as enabling actual social change (Hammond and Steward, 2008). One of the countries in the region where the ‘social turn’ (a term coined by art historian Claire Bishop in 2006) has been the most visible, especially in performing arts, is Romania, where, for instance, the umbrella term ‘documentary theatre’ is used for a wide range of approaches dealing with contemporary events, local communities, ethnic groups, etc., in forms of critical approach which emphasize exclusively the connection with the real.