Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds (ARTFICTIONS) is an Irish Research Council (IRC) Laureate Consolidator project seeking to understand the ways in which we make sense of ourselves and our futures by making sense of artistic creativity.

Artfictions will run from September 2023 until September 2027 and will be developed by a group of five researchers.

The main goal of ARTFICTIONS is to explain how contemporary societies make sense of themselves by making sense of artistic creativity. ARTFICTIONS explores narratives and stories about creativity produced at a time when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination.

The project advances a new global paradigm for the analysis of literary fictions concerned with artistic creativity and cultural production under creative and artistic capitalism.

Although its original focus is on contemporary fiction written in Spanish and Portuguese in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, the project will also explore a wide diversity of creative strategies emerging from multiple contexts and seeking to challenge neoliberal understandings of cultural production.

The main goal in ARTFICTIONS is to explain how contemporary literature is dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination.

ARTFICTIONS goes beyond state-of-the-art research and redefines the debates on contemporary fiction and artmaking by conceiving the art novel as a crucial tool to understand processes of subject formation, personal and professional self-investment, precariousness and cultural labour in times of late neoliberalism.