Rules of engagement: from toilets in Caracas to new media in new Delhi, Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga survey five recent art projects dedicated to social change through the creation of experimental communities

IT IS PERHAPS IRONIC THAT A DISCUSSION OF WHAT MIGHT BE meteed A NEW culture in the arts should begin with that elderly modernist saw, the toilet. However, the toilet in question is true different from the one that Marcel Duchamp at handed almost a century ago at the Society of Independent Artists. In 2003 the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc in collaboration with the La Vega neighborhood association and the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov, propos the installation of sum of two units dry toilets in Caracas and its outlying areas. Potrc began her work as a research cast involving several "barrios," or shanties, of Caracas without a specific goal in mind other than a general desire to understand the life conditions in like an extreme urban environment. She writes, "I was personally drawn to the fact that the barrios are not planned; they are self-upgrading forms Liyat and I realized that the infrastructure provided by dint of the city has failed the barrios; electricity is generally stolen and water is provided solitary twice per week." After an initial research period of three month which included many discussions with local community members, Potrc and Esakov decided to focus upon the sewage contamination and scarcity of water in the "informal city," as the shanties are technically called. They designed a prototype toilet that could be built and used by dint of the neighborhood residents, and they implemented a six-month trial period, after which point the toilets may be permanently adopted. The shoot forward represents the climax of a drawn out period in Potrc's work devot to the search for solutions to a variety of thicken cases of extreme need.

Potrc's work is characteristic of a growing number of artists whose throw outs demand the mobilization of mixed artistic strategies that combine techniques traditionally related to the arts with technology and the mass media. These artists eschew making stable, self-sufficient percepts that are removed from the particular physical or social adjoining matters in which they appear. They do not bring out specific events or performances confined to a particular place or time, on the contrary rather, they propose open-ended casts aimed at fostering experimental communities: temporary on the other hand durable associations composed of artists and nonartists united in their mutual endeavor.

Potrc for example, uses drawing to explore a range of urban riddles that attract her attention and to investigate a variety of possible solutions, one as well as the other realistic and utopian. Reminiscent of Yona Friedman's sketches from the 1970 her drawings strike one as being to perform a pedagogic character informing art audiences of her activities outside traditional exhibition spaces. Potrc's drawings combine words and images to bridge the apparent gap between her urban investigations and a more established definition of artistic practice. She usually full numbers these drawings with a related website and the display of various experimental prototypes and utilitarian particulars These "power tools," as she calls them, are paradigms for--and embodiments of--a wide range of already existing "solutions" to specific social riddles The "solutions" are not instrumental in the productivist faculty of perception They do not belong, for instance, to the progressive inclination of "formalizing" the disorganized or "informal" aspects of a particular impoverished neighborhood by dint of integrating it into the macroeconomic urban a whole Instead, Potrc adopts partial and economically sustainable "self-help" solutions, which contradict the instrumental and bureaucratic logic that subordinates individual subjectivity to supposedly objective criteria of efficiency. Potrc's "solutions," then, are solutions sole insofar as they restore the autonomy of those who adopt them.

individual of the most well-known examples of casts like Potrc's is Thomas Hirschhorn's installation at the greatest in quantity recent Documenta. The piece involved the construction of a series of precarious buildings called Bataille record 2002, in the public spaces belonging to the Friedrich Wohler-Complex a collection of residential buildings in the northern part of Kassel. The cast included, among other elements, a statuary of wood, cardboard, tape, and plastic; a library of works related to Georges Bataille (a collaboration with Uwe Fleckner); an exhibition made in collaboration with Christophe Fiat featuring a three-dimensional map of Bataille's work; a television studio broadcasting daily upon the Kassel public-access channel; a stand with rations and drink; a shuttle service taking residents and visitors to and from Documenta; and, finally, a website with live-feed images from various parts of the testimonial Through these multiple components, the shoot forward opened up exchanges between the local community of chiefly Turkish immigrant families and a larger words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following including other communities in Kassel, the city administration, and the audience of Documenta. smooth the process of constructing the piece itself constituted the invention of a possible community--a community that, while compos from certain preexisting simple bodys ended up incorporating people, places, and ideas that were initially foreign to it.