The art of Making Public: Mapping Networks of Art Mediation

Current art mediation practices often show experimental forms of relating "art" and "public" and are navigating in non-linear ways at the intersection of art and education. In this paper we explore what these contemporary forms of art mediation may mean, both from a theoretical and from a practice-research perspective. We describe how the "educational turn in the arts' facilitated unconventional and experimental art mediation practices: artists included educational practices more evidently as part of their artwork and education practices were more and more seen as spaces for critical cultural practice. But what do these contemporary art mediation processes mean in terms of engaged pedagogies and politics? How can we understand their positioning in the relation between culture and democracy? We propose an engaged research approach—"soft cartography"—to map practices of art mediation in urban networks. In this article we elaborate this research agenda in the case of Park Poétik, a Belgian example of art mediation practice. A soft cartography does not imply an exhaustive, objective mapping that nails down places, but rather investigates subjective motives and cultural dynamics and thereby starts from the perspectives of artists, mediators and citizens involved. This research approach allows us to explore how we can describe art mediation as public practices; as an enactment of a concern for "publicness" or an achievement of human togetherness in plurality. Finally we distillate a number of principles for soft cartography as an engaged research approach to map networks of art mediation.