Participant Space Embodied Experience and Pneumatic Interventions in Cultural Public Spaces

Abstract

The traditional boundaries between art and architecture are increasingly blurred. Spatial Praxis can be understood as a form of artistic practice. This doctoral research focuses on Participant Space as a line of artistic inquiry, where the visitor acts as a co-constitutive agent of the experience, fostering bodily engagement, reflection, and negotiation through the relational conditions of the space. The study examines Cultural Public Spaces—museums, galleries, art parks, and squares—where audiences are typically passive, highlighting how spatial interventions can activate participation and experiential awareness.

Pneumatic installations function as methodological and narrative devices, generating provisional and ambiguous environments that foreground movement, perception, and interaction. Each project articulates a relational unity between the Host Space (the existing context) and the Visitor Space (the traversable, sensitive field), producing experience in real time through trajectories, hesitation, adaptation, or resistance.

Methodologically, I combine direct observation, spatial memory, visitor records, and analytical criteria derived from museum psychology and perception theory, comparing patterns across projects and sites. Situated in dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s notion of public space, Participant Space is understood as a critical tool for designing cultural environments that activate bodily engagement, spatial friction, and social reflection.