Roger Sansi: The artist and the stone. Projects, processes, and people in contemporary art

Contemporary art practices are often described as projects or processes. But when can we say that an art project or process is finished? How is it valued? Does it become a product? In this presentation, I will discuss a particular artwork, ‘The Artist and the Stone,’ that consisted in taking an artist and a 24 tone stone from Palestine to Barcelona, Spain. Through this example, I will explore the different temporalities of process, and project, and I will reflect on how they relate to the life of the people involved in these temporalities, not only as artists but also as artworks.

Roger Sansi is associate professor at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. He received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago (2003). He has worked at Kings College and Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has done research on Afro-Brazilian culture and religion, the concept of the fetish, and on contemporary art in Barcelona. His publications include the books Fetishes and Monuments, (Berghahn, 2007), Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (edited with L. Nicolau, Chicago UP 2011), Economies of relation: Money And Personalism in the Lusophone World (U. of New England Press 2013), Art Anthropology and the Gift (Bloomsbury 2015), and The Anthropologist as Curator (Reutledge 2019).

Art from (another) perspective: Lecture series is a result of collaboration between National Gallery Prague and Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. It invites social anthropologists, geographers, sociologists and other specialists to comment on issues in and around contemporary art in ways that complement and enhance approaches of art history, aesthetics and museology.

Lecture will be in English.