Aesthetics and Politics of Participation in Benoît Maubrey’s Speaker Sculptures

Abstract This article discusses the aesthetic and political aspects of Speaker Sculptures, an ongoing series of participatory, site-specific sound artworks by the artist Benoît Maubrey. Informed by pragmatist aesthetics and combining artwork analyses with ethnographic observations, the text focuses on the expressive affordances of the sculptures and the way participants act on them. Using a variety of communication technologies, Speaker Sculptures artworks bridge the gaps between public, private, and virtual spaces and allow the participants to perform in public spaces without being physically present in them. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s theory of the public as the political, Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, and Chantal Mouffe’s antagonism theory, this article discusses the political implications of such performances.