Alex Arteaga

His artistic work can be understood as a expanding path: beginning with the composition of instrumental and electronic pieces which led to architectural sound installations, he is presently researching new and personal ways to link aesthetic practice with sustainability.

Within this research territory he is doing a PhD at the Institute of Philosophy, Humboldt University, Berlin entitled “Sensuous Framing as Strategy to Realize Sustainable Ways of Life”. His PhD research is supported by a scholarship of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

"In exploring ways to connect aesthetic and social practice, i.e. rediscovering the immanent social function of art, my research considers art as a field of practice that allows us to find and develop alternative modes of constructing reality. These alternative, cognitive modes are grounded in a holistic use of our perceptive abilities as the basis of new, integrative forms of understanding. I am therefore also interested in conceiving new modes of aesthetic practice that create frames to facilitate such forms of understanding and expansions of our consciousness. I consider this activity as a contribution to on going processes of transformation of our present toward a viable common future."

Alex has engaged actively over he last two years with Shelley Sacks' Exchange Values project, which included a presentation at the Wuppertal Institute focusing on questions of aesthetics and sustainability, with regard to the methodologies of engagement in Exchange Values. Other SSRU involvements have been with the SSRU's Earth Agenda project, and participating in the Substance Group process, initiated by Shelley Sacks and Wolfgang Zumdick in Switzerland (2007). Alex has also led seminars on 'frameworks' for the Masters programme in Social Sculpture.