Dialogical arts through sustainable communities: Acting on the margins, redefining empowerment

Entanglements of social realities may expose or hide the margins of society. One of the key roles of the arts is to elicit dialogue and generate discussion around important societal challenges that often are entangled with, and located at, margins.

In his well cited interview of 1976, Joseph Beuys maintained that ‘social sculpture’ is based on dialogical practices, that he described as ‘thinking, speaking and listening with others’ (Harlan, 2004, p. 2; Kuspit et al., 1993; Sacks, 2004, p. ix; Thistlewood, 1995). Beuys sought to transform the ways artists would interact with both the wider public and their own audiences.

Through these ideas of social sculpture, he would set the trend for a more deliberate strategy for socially-engaged practices as artists began to interact with institutions by way of their artistic methods and approaches (Harlan, 2004). Social sculpture (also re-sculpting or de-sculpting) can be considered to consist of an array or collection of multidimensional actions that shape the arts as a vehicle for social change through dialogue and activism.