Enchanted Community

Art and community: critical perspectives, 2019

Creative Commons, licence CC BY-4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ _______________________________________________________________ This special issue of the journal Estudo Prévio is the result of presentations, ideas and exchanges that took place during the 2018 conference "Art, Materiality and Representation" organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute in collaboration with the British Museum and the Department of Anthropology at SOAS in London. Though the organising institutions and the venues where historically loaded sites of anthropological legacy, the event attracted researchers, practitioners and activists from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplinary traditions: visual and performing artists, designers, museologists, curators, art historians, architects, urbanists, as well as anthropologists and those locating themselves in transitioning, often undefined domains. It was in this eclectic milieu that, together with the contributors to this issue, we discussed, among other things, the implications of making art with and for communities, and what this entails in terms of practice, ethics, participation and identity politics. Artists have engaged with communities since ancient times in both consensual and conflicting ways. Indeed, art has represented, moulded and reinvented communities through artworks that still puzzle contemporary observers (see Wong on this issue). Conversely, artistic works have been "socialised" in different epochs depending on the specific social, cultural and historical context in which they were situated. That is, forms and strategies of community engagement also depended on what Rànciere defines the "regime of the arts" in which artistic works were produced

estudoprévio: revista do centro de estudos de arquitectura,cidade e território da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, 2019

This special issue of the journal Estudo Prévio is the result of presentations, ideas and exchanges that took place during the 2018 conference "Art, Materiality and Representation" organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute in collaboration with the British Museum and the Department of Anthropology at SOAS in London. Though the organising institutions and the venues where historically loaded sites of anthropological legacy, the event attracted researchers, practitioners and activists from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplinary traditions: visual and performing artists, designers, museologists, curators, art historians, architects, urbanists, as well as anthropologists and those locating themselves in transitioning, often undefined domains.

Ethnologia Fennica

This article discusses the culture-making and place-making initiatives created at the intersection of ethnology and cultural anthropology, art and cultural politics. The focus is on the ways in which joint ethnological and artistic involvement can change the dynamics within the local community. As a case study the authors use the project Art in the Community: Redefining Heritage of the Association of Artists ‘Zemlja’ (Croatia, 2018 – 2020). The project was based on one of the most important episodes of socially and politically engaged artistic practices in Central Europe and Western Balkans: the legacy of the Association of Artists Zemlja (1929 – 1935), and naïve art and educational work of renowned painter Krsto Hegedušić. In the locality where they had worked and found inspiration – Hlebine – contemporary artists rethought their heritage and brought it to life through this project. The project was based on participatory approaches, artistic and community-empowering process that in...

Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art, 2019

This critical reflection piece originated in a visit to the 'Artists and Academics' exhibition held at Fargo Creative Village, Coventry, 26 November 2016. My thoughts about the exhibition have served as a springboard to consider ideas of scholarship, art and community more broadly. I use my research on British artists from the early twentieth century, their ideas about the processes of viewing art and the spiritual in art, to discuss examples in the exhibition. I conclude by considering how this collaborative event can bring academic ideas into conversation with artworks. I suggest that the resulting exchanges may enable viewers to think differently about art and scholarship as well as enrich academic practise.

Essay commissioned by Live Art Development Agency for inclusion in the volume 'Learning in Public: Transeuropean Collaborations in Socially Engaged Arts', one of the outputs for the EU-funded Collaborative Arts partnership Programme (http://www.cappnetwork.com), published in 2018.

This report compares the cultural value of two public artworks – Alex Hartley’s durational, dispersed Nowhereisland and Damien Hirst’s permanent, single-sited Verity that arrived in Ilfracombe in 2012. It assesses their contribution to reflective and engaged citizenship, local identity, regeneration, cultural tourism and legacy. The study responded to a methodological gap by developing a group-based participatory method - the visual matrix - that enables participants to express affective, aesthetic and cognitive experience of public art. The study compares methods and findings and triangulates with interviews and media analysis. Part 1 discusses the research methods and compares results. Part 2 discusses theoretical and conceptual foundations and analysis of the visual matrix, drawing on Alfred Lorenzer’s depth hermeneutics, the Deleuzian metaphor of rhizomatic thinking, Wilfred Bion’s conceptualization of reverie and containment and Donald Winnicott’s theorisation of transitional p...