A change in the practice and theory of art that occurred in the past few years reflects an intensified engagement with the outside world and the issues of our time -war and the eschatological dimension of terrorism, globalization and capital distribution, migration and cultural identity, transnational diasporic formations, and the reconceptualization of the term community. Attempting to broaden the focus on the social aspects of art’s production and reception, a number of artists and collectives have advanced distinct models for an art whose public strategies constitute a significant part of its aesthetic makeup. This reinscribed form of public art is discursive, premised on interactivity with the audience and among diverse social groups. The ensuing breakdown of restrictive definitions of art, artist, and spectatorship, subjectivity and communality has fostered the development of a critical dialogue that infiltrates and disturbs a dominant culture based on identity stereotypes and circumscribed notions of site. As such, this paradigm for public art sustains social awareness, a renewed urgency to act and take responsibility (Fritz Perls calls responsibility “response-ability,” the ability to respond), and collective authorship by factoring various constituencies into the construction of the work. As discussed by a number of cultural historians, to produce works engaged in social praxis, artists have become facilitators, fund-raisers, community educators, and logistical coordinators.

These issues, but also others pertaining to mobility, real and virtual nomadism, the decentering of the familiar concept of home, and the articulation of place as a discursive field of operation, inform the project go_Home, developed by the Croatian artist Sandra Sterle and Bosnian artist Danica Dakić from September to December 2001 as part of an ArtsLink residency in New York. This project, for which the two artists decided to relocate to New York and live together for a four month period, probes the elusive logic of belonging and the idea of a multiply located instead of a fixed community. The collaboration further involved the participation of guest artist and architect Marjetica Potrč from Slovenia, and actress Milica Tomić and theorist Branimir Stojanović from Serbia. In go_Home these artists from ex-Yugoslavia used the real space of their residence and the virtual home of the Internet (which served as a site for video and photographic experimentation, transatlantic texts, recipes, a calendar of events, and a chat room), to address both the dialectical relationship between home and elsewhere, and the porous concept of identity sensitive to multiple attachments. The project also included a number of live web cast seminars conceived as dinner gatherings to which local and international art professionals, architects, and representatives from immigrant service organizations were invited. In conjunction with go_Home Sterle also produced New York Diary, an online journal about her stay and experience in New York, partly fictional as evoked in the artist’s photographs documenting her walks through the streets of New York dressed as a cook, and partly real as captured in the flags waving in the aftermath of September 11. Merging reality and fantasy, patriotism and cinematic reenactment, actual dislocation and virtual relocation, Sterle exposed the instability of who one is, and by extension the instability of a fixed concept of home. Her diary, like the syncretic project go_Home, can thus be understood as a process of fostering links with more than one place at once, of inventing new geographical matrices, and -to paraphrase James Clifford once again- of desisting absolutist forms of citizenship.