Happy choices with arts: artivism, arts, crisis, and youth cultures

Abstract

Considering the development of the Escolhas [Choices] Program in Portugal, we propose, in this paper, to make an evaluation of a decade of projects of the referred program considering that their achievements were based on a primordial heuristic principle: to demonstrate how the artistic manifestations constitute a matter and an object of social intervention, demarcating a specific and defined space in the denunciation and disclosure of social problems - notably by the youngest. Determinant is to perceive how many of these initiatives not initially designed as artivism have been and are, in fact, for many of the young people concerned expressions of artivism. Artivism is a mixture of graffiti, urban art, do-it-yourself punk, music, situationism and its preferred stage is the urban space. The artivism that we seek to visualize in the Escolhas proposes - in an innovative way to the Portuguese scale - is the recovery of artistic activity as a form of social intervention. Thus, the objective of this paper is to reinforce the need for a renewed epistemological understanding of the field of the arts, as a producer of knowledge by representing in a self-autonomous way the social reality, interfering in this, and by conditioning and generating analyses and interpretations within the established knowledge. We consider that the artistic manifestations triggered in the midst of the Escolhas allow us a finer analysis of the relationship between art and crisis and of art and society. Above all, they allow us to capture the inherent complexity of the role of the arts in the social integration of young people: dealing with their ambiguities, polysemys and obliquities.