(Un)Common Grounds

This book, co-edited by Cristina Bogdan and Sofia Casarin, offers voices, gestures, testimonies, stories, conversations, and images of remembrance from places in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Russia, and Romania. It reveals the variances in how we all understand art in the public space or socially engaged art and how these came to be named, studied, and learned in different contexts. This project attests to the potency of collaboration and coalition amongst women. It contains reaffirming acts of the central overlap between us. We whole-heartedly intend to make sense of life, generate a sense of our collective experience, integrate the unbearable through practices of togetherness. From the words of my co-editor, “On the most basic level, in order to live in this world without despair – that catalyzer of pain-inflicting gestures towards oneself as well as one’s surroundings – humans look for explanations, possibilities, stories, and concepts.”