Collaborative and Participatory Arts

Learning To Love You More (2002-2009), a creation by Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, is a collective and contemporary online artwork piece. In this multimedia website, Fletcher and July gave assignments addressed to the public in general. The audience response was overwhelming and the website is considered a model among collaborative artworks. This paper examines the reasons for the positive reception and audience involvement in the website. The nature of the assignments, the use of creative writing and the community's online expression are taken into consideration. The website's connections to dialogical art and relational aesthetics are also examined. Finally, we assessed intermediality and the manner in which it appears in the assignments, in relationship to the public and as an inherent feature of the project.

Performed Realness: On participatory Art and its Ethics

In my study, Performed Realness: On participatory Art and its Ethics, I address questions stemming from my artistic practice and concerning participatory art, the split between documentary and fiction, performed realness, the ethics of the abovementioned, and authorship. I discuss these topics in dialogue with other artists’ artworks and with theories. Nevertheless, my intent is not to execute a comprehensive study on works, that have the same traits as mine. Works with moving image, my own and other artists’, which leave me to wonder and perplex me were a starting point of my research. – Is this true? Are these people performing or are they just being themselves in front of the camera? Can one be in front of the camera without performing?



In this thesis, I also address the role of an artist conducting research. The work of an artist-researcher is often a balancing act between autobiographical and scholarly text. All artistic research does by no means concern the researcher’s own artistic production. In my work as an artist conducting research, I act in a double role: On one hand, when I conduct research, I consider the artwork with an outsider’s eyes; on the other, I use maker’s knowledge, which cannot be seen in the result. Art historians Katve-Kaisa Kontturi and Hanna Johansson write about similar methods, of doing research with art. The research springs from a dialogue with artwork. The method of writing vulnerably, which anthropologist Ruth Behar elaborates on—the relation between personal stories and ethnography, in which the vulnerable observer writes him/herself into the text—is also suitable for artistic research.



My research has followed the stages of my piece Story Café (2004–2011). The piece is divided into stages: a participatory café, in which I record on video stories that the participants tell; installations of the recorded stories; and dramatizations that are based on them. The aim of the café part was to collect stories from the participators. I have used the stories to in various ways dramatize works with moving images. The meetings in the café part of Story Café resemble participatory and social artwork. On account of Story Café, an inquiry into theories on participatory art and participatory artworks is emphasized in my research. I address questions that originate from the work in relation to, for example, curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of relational aesthetics, art researcher Miwon Kwon’s discussion on nomadic site-specific work, and art historian Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics. I also consider critic and curator Claire Bishop’s critique on relation aesthetics and art researcher Shannon Jackson’s analysis of the abovementioned. I present other artists who create participatory works, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Minna Heikinaho, because their work includes topics similar to mine.



How do the power relations between the artist and the participant manifest themselves, and how is authorship divided in participatory work? Who is the author if the audience’s contribution helps to produce a piece? I examine what kind of ethical questions an artist-researcher faces in his/her work. My artistic work is based on ethical principles with similarities to philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’ thoughts of meeting the other. Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s films and texts have influenced the handling of ethical questions in my thesis and in my artwork. I address ethical meetings in my analyses of my piece, Story Café, and of other artists’ work, such as Santiago Sierra’s pieces; Renzo Marten’s film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2009); and Miriam Bäckström’s film Kira Carpelan (2007). Kira Carpelan and Episode III: Enjoy Poverty blur the boundary between fiction and documentary in an interesting way.



I consider the dividing line between documentary and fiction through an analysis of my own and other artists’ work. I examine the split between them in works that include moving images. What is performance? How much direction, scriptwriting, framing and maker’s viewpoint does a documentary piece contain? I refer to filmmaker Susanna Helke’s research on style in documentary film and film theoretician Stella Bruzzi’s definition of performative documentary film, and I include the concept of a played documentary [documentarie joué], which philosopher François Niney uses for documentary film, into the context of art. I also discuss the relation of docufiction to my works and the works I have chosen to study. The variation between performing and realness plays a role in ethical scrutiny: I distinguish appearing in fiction from appearing in a recording. Nonetheless, the difference is not always clear.



In my study, Performed Realness: On participatory Art and its Ethics, I discuss gender performativity by means of gender theorist Judith Butler’s definition. Several of my dramatized works explore gender. Gender performance may form a vital part of a piece’s theme, as in There is a Lot of Joy, too (2005), in which a youth is concerned with his gender. Dramatized moving image pieces based on recordings from Story Café deal with girls’ aggression in its various forms in my solo show, The Cage (2013).



My thesis has followed the phases and topics that arose in my artistic practice. However, my artistic practice has proceeded in a different vein from the research, more organically and intuitively. A short tale that I have recorded in the meandering Story Café becomes a moving image; a verbally narrated character becomes flesh anew in a fictive world. In some of the of the works that I analyse, the split is explicit; a crevasse exists between the performed and the given depiction of reality. By contrast, in others, it is rather a drift, where the border between realness and performance is not clear.

This piece provides a context to a project organised by the organisation Fieldworking in Wales. The author put the curator in contact with organisations and artisans in Kachchh, India after which a group of artists from Wales travelled to Kachchh, and then two female weaving artisans from Kachchh visited Wales. The exhibition is a result of the two groups of artists' inspiration taken from their explorations in each region, and collaborations with each other. The article provides a context to craft in Kachchh, and the important connections it has with the land, heritage and the people of the region.
http://ruthincraftcentre.org.uk/exhibitions/indian-threads-textile-inspirations/

Inisiativa arte partisipativu komesa utiliza barak liu nudar instrumentu hodi halo mudansa sosiál iha kontestu dezenvolvimentu internasional. Maibé, teoria mudansa ba inisiativa sira ne’e dala barak la esplika ho klaru, no buat ne’e halo prosesu planeamentu la dun efetivu no hamenus abilidade halo avaliasaun. Iha tempu hanesan, organizasaun la dun hala’o prosesu avaliasaun formál ne’ebé fornese avaliasaun kompletu kona-ba inisiativa nia rezultadu. Peskiza ida ne’e responde ba situasaun ne’e liu husi aprezenta no koko modelu foun tolu ba inisiativa arte partisipativu: modelu teoria mudansa rua ne’ebé fó suporta ba prosesu planeamentu, no maneira ida hodi halo avaliasaun kompletu.

Iha inisiativa arte partisipativu lima mak sai estudu kazu no peskiza ne’e sei aplika modelu tolu ne’ebé refere iha leten ba inisiativa sira ne’e. Prosesu ne’e fasilita hodi bele avalia se modelu ne’e serve ka lae, no mós haree inisiativa nia efetivu ka lae. Estudu kazu sira ne’e hotu-hotu bazeia iha Timor-Leste, nasaun demokrátiku foun ida ne’ebé hasoru dezafiu oi-oin depois de esperiénsia kolonializmu durante tempu naruk loos. Peskiza ne’e hatudu katak modelu sira bele kontribui ba maneira planeamentu ne’ebé bazeia ba evidénsia no avaliasaun efetivu. Modelu teoria mudansa ne’ebé aplika ba estudu kazu sira indika katak iha duni potensiál hodi bele hadi’a prosesu planeamentu iha inisiativa arte partisipativu. Bele halo nune’e liu husi fasilita prosesu hodi kria aliñamentu ho organizasaun nia valor, objetivu, rezultadu ne’ebé hakarak atinji, no atividade, no mós liu husi halo avaliasaun tuir organizasaun nia objetivu. Modelu avaliasaun kompletu fornese solusaun viavel ida hodi resolve problema kona-ba arte nia karakteristika ne’ebé susar atu avalia, no mós responde ba movimentu progresu umanu nia ezijénsia katak ita presiza konsidera rezultadu seluk tan, laos haree deit rezultadu ekonómiku no sosiál. 

Bainhira aplika modelu avaliasaun sira ne’e ba estudu kazu sai klaru katak inisiativa arte partisipativu sira oferese rezultadu pozitivu importante ba programa nia partisipante, liu-liu iha dimensaun sosiál, kulturál, no oinsa ema individu bele moris ho diak. Benefísiu ba ema individu ne’ebé boot liu mak dezenvolvimentu abilidade no hetan ideia foun ne’ebé lori ema ba oportunidade foun no komprensaun foun kona-ba sira rasik nia potensiál. Iha mós rezultadu pozitivu diretamente no la diretamente ba komunidade no sosiedade jerál, inklui hamenus sentimentu la kontente iha família no komunidade, no aumenta ema nia involvimentu pozitivu ho mundu. Dezafiu ida ne’ebé mosu beibeik ba organizasaun iha estudu kazu mak kestaun kona-ba modelu lideransa apropriadu ne’ebé fó kbiit no afirmasaun ba lideransa Timor-oan no mós sei fornese nafatin suporta efetivu no prosesu transfere abilidade. Fatór ne’ebé fó impaktu ba projetu nia susesu inklui uza prosesu partisipativu ne’ebé kreativu, lideransa nia abilidade diak hodi lidera, no oinsa staf sira sai ezemplu ba relasaun ne’ebé inkluzivu no respeita malu. Benefísiu seluk tan sei hetan husi programa sira ne’ebé fó valor ba Timor nia kultura no mós fó koñese ideia no posibilidade foun.

The long-standing relationship of archaeology with the art of its time is manifested variously throughout its history. In the last three decades this relationship has found a new expression with a handful of scholars making use of art-works and art-making as tools for research and public engagement. Their experiments have so far yielded a small yet substantial number of descriptive and (self-)reflective publications which have hitherto appeared scattered in the literature as unconnected one-off side-projects. However, their careful systematisation and historicisation suggests that they constitute an uncoordinated critique of the modernist legacy of contemporary archaeological practice, and articulate, albeit fragmentarily, a proposition for a new, counter-modern one. In the first part of my thesis I tease out and assemble the pieces of the abovementioned critique and proposition by examining the genealogies and incentives of each project described in the publications (both individually and comparatively). In the second and final part, I build on the lessons learnt from the assessment of these projects’ merits and shortcomings to explore the potential of a counter-modern, site-specific ethnographic art installation to counter and deconstruct hegemonic narratives concerning the material remains of the past, and to encourage people to establish more intimate connections with those, using as case-study the Acropolis of Athens in the years of the so-called ‘crisis’.

The long-standing relationship of archaeology with the art of its time is manifested variously throughout its history. In the last three decades this relationship has found a new expression with a handful of scholars making use of art-works and art-making as tools for research and public engagement. Their experiments have so far yielded a small yet substantial number of descriptive and (self-)reflective publications which have hitherto appeared scattered in the literature as unconnected one-off side-projects. However, their careful systematisation and historicisation suggests that they constitute an uncoordinated critique of the modernist legacy of contemporary archaeological practice, and articulate, albeit fragmentarily, a proposition for a new, counter-modern one. In the first part of my thesis I tease out and assemble the pieces of the abovementioned critique and proposition by examining the genealogies and incentives of each project described in the publications (both individua...

With the inter-linkage of social problems under the context of global capitalism, there is an increasing tendency that activists from different regions build up exchange network on their own, in a self-organized and autonomous way. This trend suggests a growing urgency in developing a trans-local perspective in reading such dynamic, and a new geographical imagination across different borders and localities. This article aims to outline the linkages and interaction of the left-wing cultural activist groups in East Asia. I would take “No Limit Tokyo Autonomous Zone”, a self-organized festival of cultural activism took place in September 201616, as an example, to illustrate the historical trajectory and the synergy generated by this platform. For this analysis, I would adopt both local and trans-local perspectives, while also considering the local actors and the activist groups around East Asia which contribute to the formation of the network, including the impacts of their subsequent extensions. Furthermore, this article attempts to discuss the meaning of running this autonomous cultural festival and what would be the ethical and heterogeneous values that activist try to advocate, in the context of countering cultural governance in the neoliberal creative economy.

This article outlines a description and explanation of the elusive, often intuitive processes engaged by participatory artists, including dance practitioners, and other performing arts and music practitioners, visual, 3D and media artists, writers, hip hop or carnival arts practitioners, in fact specialists in any artform, who work in community settings using collaborative, participatory and
workshop practices. It offers a framework and diagrams that distil the key elements of the practice - this article is aimed at a practitioner audience.

This text is part of the book published on the occasion of the annual sound art series "Territorial Practices. Visitors with ears" 2018, curated by Juan Matos Capote and produced by TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes within the framework of the Laboratorio de Acción (Tenerife, Canary Islands). The participating artists were Anna Raimondo, Brandon LaBelle, Barbara Held y Daniel Neumann.

The sound art series "Territorial Practices. Visitors with Ears" questions how we privilege seeing over hearing, the relationship between perception and contextual objectivity, and the role of the visitor in unfamiliar territories. Four international artists were invited to visit the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands) —separately and for a duration of two weeks— in order to carry out, in collaboration with local groups, research focused on listening and creating works whose main element was sound —a method that departs from the more familiar artistic interpretation and production models focused on vision. "Territorial Practices. Visitors with Ears" aims to create situations where knowledge production is based on —predominantly, but not exclusively— listening and sound in the various contexts that the island can offer to artists.

From 'Volumes', a sporadic series of first person writings on art education, community art and using curatorial methods. This text reflects on two major collaborative billboard projects in Newcastle during 2000-1. See http://alandunn67.co.uk/volumes.html

Art of Inclusion – an Examination of the Circle is the master thesis of the artist Åsa Maria Hedberg. It retells the process of an examination of the circle, used as a conceptual and visual tool in two public art acts: IMPRINT and IMPRESSION. The purpose of the study is to understand the characteristics and effects of the circle when used in participatory art of the artist. The study also aims to position the artist within the field of participatory art and artists of today.

The use of the circle is found to inform the art of the author-artist when her art works conceptually touches upon the subject matter of inclusion/exclusion. The socio-political aspect of openness of the circles of societies to any newcomer, will be an increasingly important future topic for artists to take on and engage in.

As a parallel, the international art world is another circle that includes and excludes. The artist learns from her participants and will find her way in.

Intermediations between the collective, the participatory and the collaborative in systemic artistic practices.
Within the sphere of pedagogical-artistic processes, driven on by contemporary artistic practices, whenever one wishes to refer to a mode of action which in any phase of its process of conception, production or mediation actively involves several people, the adjectives collective, participatory or collaborative are used indistinctly. If more plural and complex forms or structures appear in any of these stages of the process, or if we operate pursuing objectives such as cooperation, implication, transformation, empowerment, the creation of community, educational action, self-management, sustainability, complicity, intermediation or other similar concepts, we are faced with a type of practice that seeks to structure itself on the basis of the collective, incentivate participation and deploy collaborative mechanisms in order to materialise. Some of these forms of collective construction of the artistic are influenced by critical pedagogy which, in the realms of art, has been driven forward by the interest of mediation and educational departments that have sought to subvert the most typified functions of artistic infrastructures; others, as a result of a systemic approach of artistic practice which is established thanks to the management of complexity, the interconnection of its elements and the expansion of the practice outside its more "institutionalised" delimitations; and still others, by carrying on in accordance with the temporary impulse of artistic fashions which, in this case, contribute with noise and contamination. In spite of the fact that the collective, the participatory or the collaborative are generally used to complement one another, they take on differential nuances and make for forms of action which are sometimes opposing. This text deals with the common elements and points outs some of their differences, in an attempt to refer to a complex ecosystem in which art sometimes acts as a driving force and oversteps the boundary of its domains of legitimacy, and other times is a vector of a notion of transversality, where actors and resources typical of the artistic field connect up with projects and experiments that are not resolved within this 1

This article analyses The Knitting Map, a large-scale, durational textile installation by the performance production company half/angel. It examines the ways in which technology was used in The Knitting Map to connect the weather and the levels of busyness in Cork City (Ireland) to a community of knitters, and a year-long process of hand-knitting. The article focuses on processes of translation as a fundamental operation within this ambitious work; translation of digital data into knitting patterns, as well as technology into something familiar to a community of knitters. The article suggests that by contextualising The Knitting Map’s digital technology, the processes and language of “knitting Cork” became dialogic across generations. The Knitting Map is then framed within a broader history of radical textile projects, and community art works. The article closes with an analysis of a year-long series of knitting performances by Jools Gilson-Ellis, staged in public sites in Cork City and used as a performative strategy of engaging participants both actually and symbolically in the project.

Global health funding bodies are increasingly promoting and offering specific funding support for public and community engagement activities, in addition to research and programme funding. In the context of this growing commitment to engagement work, we need to find ways to better support contextually appropriate and meaningful exchanges between researchers and community members. I argue that, rather than focusing solely on how to involve communities in engagement with global health research, we should also pay attention to the quality and depth of the involvement of researchers themselves. This is an often overlooked dimension of community engagement in both practice and the literature. In this paper, I present three contextual factors, which created logistical and attitudinal obstacles for researchers’ involvement in meaningful engagement in a global health research unit in Nepal. These comprised implicit and explicit messages from funders, institutional and disciplinary hierarchies and educational experiences. Lessons were drawn from an exploration of the successes and failures of two participatory arts projects connected to the research unit in 2015 and 2016. Both projects intended to foster mutual understanding between researchers and members of their research population. As an engagement practitioner and ethnographic researcher, I documented the processes.

This section of the journal collates articles and other content arising from The Art of Participation Forum, which took place on the 7th & 8th of May, 2016, at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. The event brought together an international group of artists and academics who are involved in participatory arts in a variety of ways and who hail from the many corners of this wide field of activity. We wanted to explore the inherently practical phenomenon of participatory arts by doing as well as discussing, which meant that the Forum took a practice-as-research approach. To this end, we curated a programme comprised of condensed versions of academic presentations and practical workshop sessions, together with longer performance pieces. To further embed the spirit of participation within the structure of the event, we devised an innovative, non-hierarchical format, in which all attendees both lead a session and participated in each other's. This fostered a feeling of joint-owne...

‘The Big Picture’ was a participatory video (PV) project. The aim was to increase the involvement of young people in India in the active development of practice and policy regarding substance use disorder (SUD). Working with drug rehabilitation centres to innovate their programmes, the team used video production as a tool to help young people advocate for policy change by promoting public awareness of how they see this issue. Unlike many accounts of PV, which tend to focus solely on the processes of community engagement, this article also takes account of the art of the films produced. Drawing on theoretical approaches to subjectivity in autobiographical filmmaking that highlight the complex interactions between the individual and the collective in such work, the article examines, in particular, how the films created emphasize the importance of adopting a relational, communityled, approach to SUD if rehabilitation programmes are to be effective.

El presente artículo se propone estudiar parte de la producción temprana del artista chileno Gonzalo Mezza, bajo el lente complejo de un artista nómade en un escenario local dictatorial. En particular, se analizará una serie de obras que toman como punto de partida la experimentalidad con tecnologías de punta, bajo el modelo de contrapuntos mediales, en los años setenta. A principios de la década, y mientras vivía en Barcelona, Mezza inició una serie de trabajos colaborativos con artistas de distintos lugares del mundo. Posteriormente, bajo la modalidad de contrapuntos mediales (x, +, o vs) entre dos artistas o íconos de la cultura visual, Mezza estableció un sistema de trabajo que apuntaba a problematizar la idea de registro, autoría y cita. En estas piezas, el artista incluyó registros performáticos de importantes figuras como Charlotte Moorman, Rafael Alberti o Carlos Leppe. Igualmente, Mezza incluyó – a través del video y la nueva cámara Polaroid – cruces entre poesía y ensayo visual, en una propuesta de arte inédita en el Chile dictatorial.

According to Donald A. Schön, reflective practice rests  on  the  ability  to  reflect  in  action  – “thinking what [one is] doing while [one is] doing” – and reflect on action, that is, “to examine critically what one did, after the fact”.  However,  Schön proposed this concept in the 1960s and developed it during the 1970s and 80s. If we do not want to be ineffective within the current global,  complex  and  instable  situation,  we need to develop the reflexive practice. “Practice is never a pure form of local knowledge”.

in: Real Projects for Real People. Volume 3, Editor: Anne Nigten

This paper was written for my first assignment for my 'DL BA (hons) level 4 social pedagogy, education and learning, youth work and community learning and development' - YMCA George Williams College. I am a specialist informal educator carrying out my practice at The Rural Media Company. My practice involves film and media, using it to empower and strengthen rural communities and young people. Here, I look at the challenges faced by informal educators when balancing 'process' and 'product'.

This evaluation report looks at the Creative Homes pilot project, a participatory arts initiative delivered by the London Bubble, involving older people in residential homes settings. In doing so it considers impacts, best practice in terms of old people's participation and professional practice, and modelling the approach.