Preventive Publics: The Burning Car in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Installations

This talk unpacks issues of publicity and the public sphere in the oeuvre of Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, whose practiceh as been controversial for its construction of temporary “cultural centers” in lowerincome, immigrant-populated suburbs in Europe. What are the ethics behind these neighborhood installations? On a most basic level, his socially oriented pieces work to highlight the violence behind signifiers in the mass media such as the burning car clip, a reductive image that has served to stigmatize and incite fears against “foreigners” on the continent. More critically, these installations model and instantiate preventive publics, a term I employ in order to signal not only their bringing together of diverse strangers, but also their calling for longer-term, self-organized, and non-exclusionary relations among such strangers in order to prevent violence in the larger public domain.