En torno al arte y la diversidad funcional. Prácticas artísticas participativas para la Inclusión de las personas con diversidad funcional en el arte contemporáneo

Resum

The following doctoral dissertation, titled On Art and Functional Diversity: Participative Artistic Practices in Contexts of Functional Diversity, analyses the intersections between the notions of art and diversity. At present, diversely functional people keep fighting every day in order to be and remain involved in every cultural area, among which we cannot forget the cultural and artistic realms. It follows from this that we should start from the ensuing certainty: a non-inclusive type of culture implies the impoverishment of our entire cultural system, which will prevent us from taking positive advantage of diversity, and will turn it into a partial and weakened culture. Our dissertation proposes a theoretical and practical journey which will allow us to show that contemporary art ends up by being a most suitable medium to include diversely functional people back in society, and this inclusion can and must be achieved in an equalitarian as well as normalised way, leading the journey towards more inclusive communities. This dissertation comprises an introduction, a first part -which defines the theoretical framework in four chapters-, a second part -focused on the analysis of practical experiences-, as well as a set of conclusions and appendixes. In the first chapter of the theoretical framework, titled Around the Quandary of Disability, we will approach the notion of disability throughout its history and several paradigms. In the second chapter, called The History of Art and Diversity: From Psychopathologic Art to Outsider Art, we will go through the common history of art and diversity, starting from the first artistic works produced in the great psychiatric institutions since the 18th century, until more updated projects that currently refer to those works as outsider art. The third chapter, Art and Diversity: From Art as a Therapy to the Possibility of Art for Art's Sake, Meant for Diversely Functional People, analyses the different viewpoints from which art produced by people with disabilities has been considered, beginning with several ideas of art within occupational therapy, art therapy, and art brut or outsider art, to finally open pathways to the possibility of art for art's sake focusing on diversely functional people, and towards a culture of inclusion. The fourth chapter, Contemporary Art as Background for Art and Functional Diversity, traverses the contemporary art practices that began to consider a democratisation of art so as to define, from the vantage point of community art, the notion of participative art practices in contexts of diversity, with foundations on many influential disciplines: philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology. All of which allows us to set up an adequate point of view where the experiences described in the second part of our research are located. The second part, Participative Artistic Practices in Contexts of Functional Diversity, expounds and analyses a set of contemporary experiences in which we have been working since 2012 with mixed groups (people with and without functional diversity) from the perspective of integrated arts practices. These experiences have been classified in three main groups because of the different contemporary languages used. We begin with a series of experiences dealing with collective textile arts, highlighting the possibility for the fabric to embody a metaphor of social links; we continue with collective performances from a shared-body perspective, to finish with participative installation art as a strategy to inhabit a common realm. By means of joining the development of the theoretical framework with the analysis of practical experiences, we can focus then on a series of final conclusions which aim at the many possibilities of the aforementioned participative artistic practices as a means that allows for the real and standardised inclusion of diversely functional people in contemporary art. Furthermore, we will establish the essential elements for these artistic practices as a procedure to generate a methodology focused on promoting inclusive artistic practices.