Flipchart, Pebble and Pro-test sign

In recent times more and more audiences have turned from spectators into users and play an active role in shaping certain art practices. Non-human actors such as objects and materials are active agents in transforming, informing and obscuring collaborations between artists and their audiences. Particularly in recent forms of social art practices, or ‘dialogical art’, materials and spaces are used as vessels of communication, rather than transformed into autonomous art objects. This change in agency of all the stakeholders in the art production process demands another way of looking at materials. In this paper the ruru huis, a project by the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa in Arnhem the Netherlands, serves as a case study to investigate the agency of objects and materials in a social art practice. Whereas previous studies of cultural production have been mainly focused on social factors within cultural production, this paper takes a socio-material perspective based on ideas such as the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour to explore how objects and materials may form an active part in collaborative processes. Using an object-oriented methodology through participant observation, this research analysed many different configurations that occurred in the ruru huis. From these observations three different categories are identified in regard to how objects and materials are being used: 1) facilitating, 2) operative, and 3) evidential. Subsequently all three functions relate to inclusiveness and active participation in different ways. While some objects are important actors because of their familiar or inconspicuous functioning, others enhance usership through ambiguity. Moreover we have found that many objects and materials in the ruru huis were often incomplete, shapeless, nondescript or empty on purpose. Therefore, this paper suggests that within a social art practice, the agency of objects and materials become more visible precisely when they are slightly antagonistic or dysfuntional. In the case of the ruru huis, this ‘friendly antagonism’ was at times successful and at other times less effective in creating temporary communities and dialogue.