“Exhibitions: An Artistic Proposition to Reorder the Social”

This chapter centers on the form of the exhibition as a mode of political intentionality, characterized by a commitment to accessibility and a determination to subvert existing categories of meaning. Starting with Eloísa Cartonera’s original understanding of its practice as social sculpture, the chapter demonstrates how Eloísa’s stance influenced the work of other collectives. In keeping with cartonera more generally, such influence was never prescriptive; over time, different collectives came to their own understanding of how to create a cartonera exhibition. And yet, a commitment to an artistic practice that seeks dialogue with the social remains clear. We understand cartonera’s rough-and-ready aesthetic and its practitioners’ preoccupation with relations and encounters as key to the exhibition form; when exhibiting work, cartoneras propose a movement away from the fetishized and auratic and toward the convivial and process-based. Returning to ethnography, we describe how, based on the method of referring to gesture, we co-organized a cartonera exhibition in São Paulo. In this exhibition space, unexpected encounters occurred that led to socio-aesthetic interventions. The cartonera book was just one element of the cartonera exhibition; through dialogues, learning spaces, and the emphasis on process, cartonera’s relation to art has presaged the emergence of a very specific form of exhibition, one that constitutes a gesture of resistance and the reordering of social contexts and hierarchy, one that realizes art’s potential to constitute new collective worlds.