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Paper short abstract

This paper traces an object itinerary of Christoph Büchel’s activist artwork Barca Nostra to investigate artistic readymades as hybrid objects that overcome the separation of aesthetic and political judgements.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Karen Barad’s notion of agential intra-action, this paper seeks to determine how artistic readymades (objects taken directly from the world and reframed as art) function as hybrid objects that can foster the production of knowledge in interaction with other actors. For the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Christoph Büchel presented Barca Nostra, the wreckage of a migrant boat that sank in the Sicilian Channel in 2015. Büchel’s action sparked fierce debate and a series of secondary activist actions on the exhibition site. The relational entanglements that formed around Barca Nostra can be viewed through Barad’s ethico-onto-epistem-ology, which shows that all world-making is deeply ethical. New Materialism proposes that if ‘things (and humans equally) are in a constant state of becoming, vibrating or extending out along lines and across webs of being’, then we can ‘trace those movements and resonances to understand their distributed agency’ (Bauer 2019). An object itinerary follows ‘the routes through which things circulate’ (Joyce and Gillespie 2015). Barca Nostra is a politico-aesthetic object: it functions at a remove from politics, but it is inherently political because it reflects upon and interacts with the world. Aesthetics and politics ‘overlap in their concern for the distribution and sharing out of ideas’ (Bishop 2012). By tracing an object itinerary, the different intra-actions of Barca Nostra, this paper will show that not only does art provide a different lens to epistemic objects, but how art objects themselves are knowledge producing.