Towards a Model of Collaborative Aesthetic Practice at Borderlands

What is represented and how something is represented has real life consequences. Aesthetic representations circulate in and out of societies and govern to a large degree what is visible. This renders aesthetics a field with political stakes: as ways of seeing and showing, it not only determines what is visible, but also what can be said about what is visible.
Scholarship, at least the type that is usually produced in humanities departments, typically engages with the assessment of aesthetic representations by critiquing and contextualizing. Traditionally based on written language, this type of scholarship focuses on the aesthetic experience, perception, and judgement of such diverse practices as theatre plays, visual arts, literature and music. However, not only the work commonly described as artistic, but also the aesthetic practices of everyday life and popular culture (including objects and activities that make up the daily life of ordinary people) determine our aesthetic experience of the world and define our possibilities of participating in it. Contrary to aesthetic practice that results in cultural works, everyday aesthetics found in commonplace activities have been largely neglected by mainstream European art institutions and academic research.
My research project seeks to address this neglect and is situated at the intersection of everyday aesthetics and creative-academic inquiry. Opening up the discourse of aesthetic practice to a cross-cultural and decolonial perspective, I plan to address these aspects by working towards a theory of practice that is based on collaboration. More precisely, I want to develop a model for understanding, describing, and representing collaborative aesthetic practices, and I want to put this model to use by engaging with collaborative aesthetic practices in the context of borders and borderlands.
The intended outcome is to intervene in established border narratives of travel and tourism and to open them up to new aesthetic experiences. Since so much of our perception and our lived experience at borders depends on our positionality (largely defined by the passport we carry and the body we carry), collaborative processes of aesthetic practice can become an important instrument to make perceivable the simultaneous reality of other geo-political subjects.1

1 When I talk about collaborative aesthetics, I mean for example, activities such as reading, walking or waiting that are shared between tourists and migrants in the same place and time, but also the representation of different border experiences within the same frameworks and narratives.
experiences within the same frameworks and narratives.