Community art should take cues from theater, says Christian Caliandro

In an interview on Artribune, Christian Caliandro and students discuss how community art can learn from theater to become more inclusive. They argue that contemporary art often excludes those without artistic tools, unlike cinema and music. Marta cites Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave (2001) as a model of participatory art that selects a theme and develops it through co-creation, but notes the difficulty of documenting such process-based works. Claire Bishop defines this as replacing finished products with open social processes. The conversation turns to theater as a reference: futurist evenings and Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, which eliminates distance and makes spectators feel alive through objective unpredictability. Rossella highlights that theater companies involve conscious, competent co-creators, suggesting that community art could adopt a similar structure with a director (artist) guiding the vision. The interview is part of a series on community art published by Artribune.