Palm Tree Whispers and Mountain Escapes: How Contemporary Artworks Contribute to an Inclusive Public Sphere

Abstract

How do artworks contribute to a more inclusive public sphere? Artworks contribute to the inclusiveness of a public sphere in that they help us consider previous objects as acting subjects, and thus as entities deserving membership in the public sphere. In addition, artworks typically attract a public, thus generating the necessary recognition for additional subjects. We propose a typology that categorizes artworks' contribution to an inclusive public sphere. The typology is based on two axes: (a) artworks' explicitness in attributing the status of a subject to a previous object and (b) the number of people that get to see the artwork. In order to illustrate the applicability of the typology and in order to understand how the two dimensions relate to one another, we analyze how two artworks include the non‐human as subjects into the public sphere: Eduardo Navarro's Sound Mirror (shown at the 2016 São Paulo Biennal) and Prabhakar Pachpute's Mountain Escape (exhibited in the 2016 Colombian Salón Nacional de Artistas). Comparing both artistic strategies we find that there may be a trade‐off between the explicitness and the reach of a new subjectification.