The essay presents the results of an interdisciplinary research project curated by Forum Disuguaglianze e Diversità that investigates the potential of the contemporary arts to affect common sense. Hegemonic societal common sense has enabled a plethora of harmful policies over the last forty years and now fuels the ongoing anti-democratic and authoritarian dynamics present throughout the world. Challenging this prevailing common sense is therefore an indispensable condition for any strategy of change towards an egalitarian future. For this purpose, information, communication, public debate, and mobilisation are necessary but nonetheless insufficient. Something greater is needed to shake ingrained beliefs and prejudices, to offer a glimpse of an alternative. Art, as history shows us, can help stimulate this rupture, unsettling, opening up to other points of view, and foreshadowing worlds of greater justice. A significant portion of today’s contemporary art challenges dominant veins of thought, uncovers and explores injustices, and often accompanies processes of territorial development, but rarely offers utopian prophecies, struggling to affect the prevailing common sense. Many social and civic organisations, and sometimes even public policies, turn to the arts, but rarely with the intention of stimulating a change in common sense. Nevertheless, the territorial vocation of contemporary arts, under certain conditions outlined in this essay, can prove to be an opportunity to reach and change the prevailing common sense.
