Art intervenes in social realities: it occupies public spaces, disrupts familiar routines, makes grievances visible, and provokes debate. But under what conditions does this succeed? What do artists and art collectives need in order to intervene at all? And what affects whether their interventions are being noticed and may open a path to change? The sociological subproject seeks to answer these questions. Essential to what we do is the concept of infrastructure: the project asks what conditions must be met for artistic interventions to emerge and take effect. These include resources, networks, and access to spaces on the part of the artists themselves, as well as external conditions such as political opportunity structures, media attention, and public discourse. Such infrastructures are not equally accessible to everyone: who gets to intervene, and who gets heard, is shaped by broader relations of power and inequality. More specifically, the project is interested in the constellations that render artistic interventions possible in the first place, how these conditions relate to the aesthetic forms and strategies of intervention, and whether there are specific patterns that may help understand the emergence and effectiveness of interventions. To find out, the project conducts interviews with art collectives and compiles an archive of artistic interventions in German-speaking countries. These empirical findings are brought into dialogue with theoretical perspectives from the sociology of art, social movements, and social inequality.

Head of Project

Prof. Dr. Christian von Scheve (UP 2)

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr. Simon Teune (UP 1)