In a time marked by the crisis of liberal and capitalist democracies, and the rise of autocratic and populist governments around the world, I argue that people find in art forms an alternative for enacting innovative political participations that keep the democratic spirit alive. This democratic articulation is the result of the people appropriation of art forms through which they voice their collective demands and make visible the unfair social and economic conditions that they face in their daily life. This participation in the public affairs allows the people to create a political sphere framed by values such as rebellion, resistance, solidarity, imagination, creativity, freedom of speech and assembly. In such a political sphere it is possible to observe both a poetic function of the people’s vocabulary and an artistic representation of the people’s political actions. From these two aspects emerges what I call people’s art forms.
In this sense, three central questions guide this paper: First, how do art forms enrich people’s political voice in the public sphere?; second, how do people’s art forms impact on the democratization of society?; and, third, what kind of democracy do people’s art forms articulate? In this sense, I focus on the capacity of the people to voice their collective concerns through art forms as well as on both the contribution of artistic expressions to the democratization of society, and the constitution of an alternative meaning of democracy.
Despite the traditional debate about the autonomy of art from politics, there is a consolidated theoretical and empirical framework that underlines the strong impact of artistic practices on the social and political realities of the people. Through these practices art forms intervene the political sphere and contribute to the democratization of the society by: a) Revealing the conditions of life, shedding light on what prevailing systems keep hidden —such as public issues and marginalized communities (Benjamin, 1969; Lee, 2017), b) Raising social consciousness (Kalyva, 2016; Diaz, 2020), c) Expanding the public sphere (Dabène, 2020), d) Enriching political vocabulary (Whitebrook, 1995; Butor, 2012; Piccato, 2019), e) Fostering a sense of belonging and collective responsibility for the community (Schuster, and Ortega, 2015), f) Encouraging political participation and resistance — highlighting the political agency of excluded populations (Bettez, 2006), h) Nourishing public debate (Dabène, 2020), and, i) Envisioning alternative futures (Graeber, 2011).
Throughout the paper, I discuss artistic expressions that reflect the interconnection between alternative ways of making politics and the reinvention of democracy. I further argue that such art forms stimulate the flourishing of an alternative framework of political vocabulary and forms of egalitarian and horizontal social relationships.