The arts are currently subject to increasing demands to be socially impactful. Across the globe, they are striving to change social processes, intervene in political conflicts and create new public spheres. The arts involve themselves in conflicts over global power relations and human rights, address crises such as climate change and global pandemics and devise new ways of living and working. Intervening arts are productive, developing new forms of activity and not infrequently recurring to the tools of the activist. These tendencies call for a fundamental redefinition of art as an interventionist practice.

The global demands of art to be socially impactful, show presence in global crises and to face political challenges has not changed in recent years. To the contrary: the (desired or undesired) political involvement of the arts has become even more intensive and urgent in light of violent conflicts, increasingly repressive and authoritarian governments and polarizing publics. How can the intervention of the arts be described and what effects does it have on society, on individual social groups, artistic discourse–and, not least of all, on the arts themselves and their conceptualization? In the first funding period (2022-2026), the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) was able to elaborate the practices and poetics of intervention for different art forms and areas of investigation and, in doing so, point out important differentiations. These investigations provided the impression that the efficacy or “success” of these practices is at least as strongly dependent upon material resources, framework conditions and infrastructures as it is upon previous programs and designs. This is why the attention of the CRC will be shifted to the interventionist practices in their relationship to framework conditions and infrastructures in the second funding period (2026-2029). What are the framework conditions for an effective “intervening” or “coming between” of artistic practices on heterogenous societal fields of conflict? How does these practices use existing situative infrastructures and how can they bring about new infrastructures of their own accord? The respectively mobilized resources and structures are a key to the more precise understanding of the efficacies as well as the limits of the interventions of the arts.

The CRC unites art-related disciplines with philosophy, history and sociology. It is based within the Free University of Berlin and cooperates with the Berlin University of the Arts, the Europe University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Leuphana University Lüneburg as well as the Prussian Culture Heritage Foundation.