A poetics of opacity: towards a new ethics of participation in gallery-based art projects with young people

Trafi-Prats, Laura ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3468-1073, deFreitas, Elizabeth, Rousell, David and Hohti, Riikka (2022) A poetics of opacity: towards a new ethics of participation in gallery-based art projects with young people. In: Visual participatory arts based research in the city: ontology, aesthetics and ethics. Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City . Routledge, London, pp. 126-142. ISBN 9780367462963 (hardback); 9781003027966 (ebook)

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Abstract

This chapter elaborates on an ethics of participation in the context of creative inquiry with young people in art galleries. More specifically, it discusses a project called Sensing Time, which engaged researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manifold Research Lab and the Young Contemporaries, a youth gallery programme at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. The chapter draws on the ideas of Edouard Glissant to rethink participation in terms of a poetics of opacity, showing how the project involved the collective making of a rhizomatic network of errant relays. It presents key ideas in the Antillian philosophy of Glissant and utilizes these concepts to analyse participatory techniques in the project. The chapter then examines how Fred Moten’s work on the aesthetic excess and appositionality of black bodies supports Glissant’s image of a networked urban life thriving through opaque and imperceptible relations. Glissant’s poetics of opacity cultivates an onto-epistemological resistance to rendering the other transparent and legible.