Autogenous Culture as Political Form: An Investigation Through Participatory Art with Communities in Singapore

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In Singapore, the discussion of all things ‘community’ is highly sensitive and potentially provocative. Artists who work with communities risk being politicised for various identitarian purposes. This book presents an auto-ethnographical account of three participatory art projects conducted by the author, with the incarcerated in a governmental disciplinary centre, a Non-Governmental Organization that supports sex workers and three young women in an independent art project in Singapore. It proposes a concept of autogenous cultural practices, which are defined by life practices that neither rely on nor protest the influence of the state on the site of the body and everyday life. Instead autogenous cultural practices establish their own forms of life and measures of value that are in no way dictated by predetermined institutional forms of social life and engagement.