In the second half of the twentieth century, the relationship between artists and audiences in the visual arts has been deeply transformed. Regardless of geography, social oriented art is now a genre in itself, guided by the desire to question object, artist and audience.

There are several names for the artistic proposals interested in creative and civic rewards of participation. Although controversially one adopts the concept of participatory art, where people are the central artistic medium, using essentially the performance in the visual arts (cf. artists as Tiravanija).

Emerging from Postmodernism (Mandel, 1975; Anderson, 1998), participated art is founded on successive cultural (Jameson, 1998), educational (O'Neill & Wilson, 2010) and social turns (Bishop, 2006), as attempts to rethink the political potential of art, reconsidering forms of production, mediation and consumption. The narrative of art against the passivity of the masses and the desire to enable the public arises from another broader: the emancipation of capitalism (Santos, 2002). These assumptions involves depositing on participatory art the responsibility of a social commitment promoter of emancipatory social relations (Kester, 2004; Thompson, 2012; Jackson, 2011).

However,the collective identity of the participants has been reinvented. They are no longer just a faceless mass, excluded, or random communities. Today, participants are volunteers in a continuous exercise of media and instant culture (cf. artists as Gormley). At the same time, there is an ethical turn in critics. The artist tend to be judged by the degree of collaboration of their work and criticized for holding any hint of the other.
Participatory art is not a linear formula of political art, or recognize itself in so many other aspects of the new spirit of capitalism - network, mobility, design, or handling (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).

Therefore with this global ethnography (Burawoy, 2000), under design, we intend to study participatory art as a creation social space and social and artistic contemporary intervention, recognizing actors, extensions of this expression and mapping its presence in the global art circuit . We longs to observe the creative process and interview the participants in order to understand the relationship between (i) audience participation, (ii) artists and participants life paths’ (iii) and its artistic and political engagement. It is intended, thus, to create a theoretical and empirical apparatus that combined participative production between artistic, scientific and social fields.

Given the embryonic state of this project and recognizing the critical continuities and discontinuities looming theoretical literature on participatory art, we intend to discuss experiences of miscegenation between object, artist, audience and research, discussing some of the multiple tensions summed: the call for active cultural citizenship, political and civic education, critical attitude towards the scholarly of most cynical contemporary languages, aesthetics and ethics experiments or even the requirement for status of art reformulation, the incorporation of social engineering strategies, commodification of bodies, domination and symbolic violence.

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