Beyond Site-Specificity: Environmental Heterocosms on the Street

Abstract

Contemporary artists performing on the streets of European towns and cities do not seek to hide the everyday world that surrounds their performances. Rather they create an inextricable link between the fiction of theatrical performance and the reality of the public space in which it intervenes. Fantasy and actuality are simultaneously visible and tangible to both casual passer-by and intentional spectator. Here fiction does not work in opposition to reality; rather, the imaginary reinterprets, confuses, subverts, or challenges the real. The onlookers, who see familiar sites through a lens of artistic imagination, experience a re-vision of what seemed established or permanent, and that unexpected shift in the experience of what was, moments before, a familiar world, causes an experiential shock.¹ As boundaries between the fictional and the actual (between art and non-art) become permeable, perhaps indistinguishable, the audience-participants wander in sites with multiple levels of reality. This blurring of the imaginary and the quotidian has the potential to change how the public sees, understands, and experiences daily life in today’s world.