Unexpected learning

This study is about play. It is about some of the forms of play you may have engaged in as a kid and are now integrated in the art practices of three artists, Núria Güell, Jordi Canudas and Nicolás Dumit-Estévez. Their practices defy the traditional conceptions of both art and play as ends in themselves. This study is contextualized as phenomenological research that aims at understanding what role play can assume in socially engaged art practices, and in what ways it provides a dynamic filter or trajectory for carrying each work forward. It is centered on the experiences of three artists who have developed practices that are participatory, presented in public spaces, open to diverse audiences, and whose design seeks at questioning, transforming or experimenting with new forms of sociability. The study presents the artists’ narratives through interviews and intertwined with the researcher’s experience with the data and documentation, acting as a site for shared meaning making. The findings of the study suggest that essential to play is movement, and that play’s integration in socially engaged art practices opens up transitional or permeable spaces in which previously discrete identities become border crossings opening to the potential emergence of new ideas about self and society.