Scalar Aesthetics and the Public Politics of Home

ABSTRACT In this article, I demonstrate the value of attending to scalar aesthetics. By scalar aesthetics, I mean the showing, making perceptible or making public of relations between big and small, specific and general, local and global, domestic and international. I suggest that the burgeoning field of ‘art geographies’ and research in cultural geography more generally should extend and sharpen its attention to scale. As an extension to geographical research on how scales are produced through social and political‐economic processes, scalar‐aesthetic analysis elucidates the cultural production of scale. Building on Neil Smith's work on ‘scale‐jumping’, I examine how aesthetic leaps constitute constellations of knowledge that instantiate political effects. I focus empirically on scalar‐aesthetic interventions into the politics of home within the Swedish art world, analysing especially the work of Meriç Algün. Algün uses what I call ‘coarse’ scalar aesthetics and finite lists to make perceptible the scale of migration bureaucracy and the expanded scale of borders. Her work highlights the coarseness of the interpenetration of private and public scales, revealing how borders are encountered at constellating scales. Through offering scalar‐aesthetic knowledge on the home and its scalar politics, her work intervenes in domopolitical debate. I argue that paying attention to scalar aesthetics can help geographers understand the kinds of relations, connections and leaps that reveal and contest the scalar politics of home. More broadly, scalar aesthetics are a potentially valuable source of geographical knowledge on the world's scales; they have a radical potential to model different routes to generalisability and to challenge dominant scalar paradigms. Scalar aesthetics analysis is therefore a key means through which cultural geographers can address ‘big’ questions of public importance.