The lure of diglossia: A conversation with Grant Kester

This interview with Grant Kester touches on the main issues surrounding socially engaged art. Kester, one of the leading voices in the configuration of a specific critical approach to collaborative, socially led artistic processes, depicts in this conversation a broad panorama of practices spanning from the 1980s to the present moment, a time when mainstream art institutions have begun embracing social practice. Attentive to that process, Kester reconstructs some pivotal experiments oriented to the consecution of social change through artistic means. He also aims to frame the global purchase of socially engaged art, paying attention to how this expansion affects the critical approaches to specific artistic projects, and disclosing how socially engaged art projects can still hold an emancipative potential.