Tony Valberg
“Strange doing something so close to nothing” - Contemporary Art and its Access to Relation, Participation and Togetherness
The quote in the header emerged during a conversation between researcher Helene Illeris and a participant in the newly finished project Being-with. This artistically based research project set out to study participatory and relational practices within the arts as well as addressing the aesthetic and epistemological questions such practises generates. The participants in Being-with – researchers and artists as well as children, parents, grandparents, siblings and other residents in the small town of Høvåg in Norway – gathered weekly for half a year in 2014 to experience how aesthetic production (visual art and music) interacts with social space to establish a dis-automation of everyday life. The project aims to show the potential of arts not only to reflect our lives, but also to shape them and change the social surroundings we are part of. Alongside Valberg the visual artist Agnete Erichsen and professor Helene Illeris constituted the team organizing this project.
Bio
Associate professor Tony Valberg is a trained musician from Agder Music Conservatory working at Agder University, Norway. His projects, as his Ph.D thesis, aims to shed light on questions like how aesthetic production interacts with social space and vice versa. Lately he has focused on opportunities to invent and create social interstice suited to produce experiences of togetherness, as well as critique of the authoritarian consequences such a notion has proved to contain. Valberg practice – that might be labeled participatory art – has been characterized by bringing his own and his students' artistic interventions to places and people that are usually kept to the fringes of the art-scene in order to develop aesthetic reflections and social action.