“The only acceptable end purpose of human activities,” writes Guattari, “is the production of a subjectivity that is forever self enriching its relationship with the world”. A definition that ideal applies to the practices of contemporary artists: by creating and staging devices of existence […] instead of concrete objects which hitherto bounded by the realm of art, they use time as a material. […] The production of gestures wins over the production of material things.”

— Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics

Art, in its entirety, could be defined as an act of rebellion against some established value: the propeller, the starting point of an artist is oftentimes the desire to either manifest new principles or satisfy new needs of its society. And even though some among the most prominent philosophers (Marco Aurelio, for instance) have insisted that life cycles merely repeat themselves under different guises, they would most probably think again if they were to witness the 21st century, mostly due to two phenomena: first, we are collectively realising that more output is not linearly related to more wellbeing; second, friendliness is being replaces by user-friendliness and social gatherings are shifting into memes. The point being made is not that our time ranks higher than any other; rather, for the first time, artists find themselves in the position of providing the setting for socialisation rather than an object.

First of all, the title: what does one define as relational art? Relational art, as articulated by the author, comes to include all contemporary practices which depart from the ensemble of human relations and their context rather than an individual and isolated reality. Think of contemporary exhibitions and performances. They clearly do not fit within the romantic established definition of art: often, be it at a museum or in the streets, the most recurring word a visitor might hear is “Bah”.

However, given that our necessity for objects is thoroughly satisfied by the productive methods stemming from capitalism, what does our society lack? Interactions. Occasions to reduce the mechanical in ourselves and dare to think differently. As the point shifts from proving the privileged point of view of the single artist to studying the motivations and the modalities of interpersonal relations, art attempts to offer the ground for unusual rhythms and otherwise impossible meetings rather than laying against a wall.

And for how abstract the process might sound, it is revolutionising the photographic experience more and more as well. In multiple ways. The last years have witnessed an impressive shift in terms of what is studied by the photographic medium: as documentation of major events is now carried out by means of surveillance cameras and multitudes of phones, photographers are turning to a study of social interstices. Rather than photographing what is explicitly happening before their eyes, they embark in the ambitious task of capturing what is not occurring and trying to understand why. Basically, they produce gestures, bringing to light behaviours and ways of coping with our reality that had until recently been taken for granted. One might wonder why they do so. As technological interactions are gradually replacing (or at least complementing) physical ones, threatening to alter our ways of relating to one another and eliminating many uses that have been until now rooted in our social etiquette, photography attempts to propose forthcoming developments and substitutive gestures for the interactions of tomorrow.

As usual, through a single medium, photography reveals to play a twofold role: a documentary language to study how we relate to each other and a proponent of modes in which we might do it in the future. As usual, being the artistic practice that most relies on the visible reality, photography reveals to actually explore the unseen.