Outcome of a socially engaged process, this book brings together several texts and reflections on the foundations of engaged art. In today's Quebec, where it has become impossible to ignore the environmental disaster and the sociopolitical context, it’s clear that the texts comprising this publication permeated with this context; the changes associated with COVID-19, the power of social media, the rise of populism, the polarization, the grip of identity politics are repeatedly mentioned and mark every facet of the topic.

This book has resulted in a work of such varied forms of discourse as project descriptions, accounts of artistic development, exchanges between artists, and critiques of art works. The questions they raise are many: what is art’s function? What does the label “diversity-artist” mean for the artist concerned? Can socially engaged art have undesirable effects, or ones that even negate the artist’s intentions? How can art resist the logic of return value? Are manoeuvres immune to assimilation by the cultural industry? Can they counteract the various infringements on our freedom? How can the material object become a pretext to create connections? How are these connections and this object transformed by the social and political context?

The artists featured in these texts, for their part, offer a fresh perspective on territories that are familiar and common to us all, infusing them with elements that shift our usual perception.

Artists : Sylvie Cotton, Yvonne Dröge Wendel and Lino Hellings, Maggy Flynn, Romeo Gongora, Catherine Lalonde Massecar and Érick d'Orion, Chris Lloyd, Yann Pocreau, Alain-Martin Richard, Kathleen Vaughan and 81 participants, and Kim Waldron