THINGSTIGATE has made important progress in exploring how aesthetic objects influence social and political life. A central component of the project, the workshop-performance "Make Your Own Passport", completed fieldwork across multiple locations in Sweden in 2024, and is being prepared for fieldwork in Italy. This participatory performance invites individuals to make, hands-on, their own 'passports'—imagining alternative identities, facing randomised scenarios such as statelessness, and reflecting on borders, migration, and belonging. The sessions generated a rich set of observations and reflections, which are now being prepared for in-depth analysis.
The concept of “things-in-common” has also been developed through interdisciplinary conferences, keynote presentations, and a solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art/HMoCA ("Tintin Wulia: Things-in-Common", 21 Sep 2024 to 5 Jan 2025), dedicated to exploring this idea through artistic research. As part of the exhibition, the research team, including Postdoctoral Researcher Kelly Ka-Lai Chan and MA intern Maxine Chionh, contributed a new participatory artwork, "Butsu-butsu Ko-kan (物々交換)" conceived in collaboration with HMoCA’s curators. This live exchange space allowed over 300 objects, each linked to a personal story, to be traded over the course of 39 days as part of the exhibition “Meeting Point: Encounter, Get to Know, Exchange” (21 Sep to 4 Nov 2024). This evolving installation offered valuable insight into how material things can act as shared anchors for meaning-making. A book was published by HMoCA to accompany the exhibition, featuring contributions from across disciplines—including curator Naoko Sumi, cultural scholar Ariel Heryanto, anthropologist Karen Strassler, ecologist Deborah M. Gordon, and journalist Vincent Bevins—further extending the project’s research into public and scholarly contexts.
The project also produced a peer-reviewed article, “Aesthetic Resistance: Publicness, Potentiality, and Plexus,” published in the Journal of Political Power, an interdisciplinary journal in political and social theory. The article offers a framework for understanding how art resists dominant structures not through direct confrontation, but through subtle shifts in perception, emotion, and relation. Its three core dimensions—publicness, potentiality, and plexus—align closely with THINGSTIGATE’s broader investigations into how aesthetic objects move through and influence social life.