Making Do:Agency and objective chance in the psychogenetic portraits of Jaume Xifra.

In this article, I explore three central questions in the Anthropology of Art: agency, relational esthetics, and objective chance, through the work of a contemporary artist, Jaume Xifra. These three questions are strictly related, and they are at the foundation of an active dialogue between anthropologists and contemporary artists. Since Mauss and the surrealists to Alfred Gell and relational art, anthropology and modern art have shared a critical approach to the ontological separation of things and people established by modern discourse. Discussing practices of magic and gift exchange, anthropologists and artists have always been interested in understanding how people can become things and things, people.