Communicating Social Change
Mapping the Discourse on the Health-promoting Impacts of Community Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Charlotte Lombardo
Art-making and creative expression are powerful tools for personal and social learning, growth and transformation. This rationale is at the essence of the practice known as community arts (CA). CA have been defined as artistic activity based in a community setting characterized by dialogue and co-creation with the community. CA initiatives are increasingly being positioned as “whole person approaches” for improving health at individual and community levels, drawing on the WHO definition of health as a “complete state of physical, social and mental well-being”. CA programs cite goals ranging from improving the social and emotional well-being of participants, to promoting civic dialogue and community building. A growing body of literature seeks to substantiate the health-promoting impacts of arts initiatives. This work however, has been hampered by complexities of practice, and disagreement about what constitutes the best or most valid forms of evidence. This talk will explore current understandings of health-promoting impacts of CA, discuss the underlying goals, epistemologies and tensions of CA impact analyses, and identify potential ways forward.
Beyond Toxic Reproduction: The (Eco-)Aesthetics of Negative Affect in Contemporary Anthropocene Narratives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Allison Mackey
How might literature help us understand how the Anthropocene feels? Cvetkovich’s work on depression as the “structure of feeling” governing neoliberal capitalism invites us to consider “why we live in a culture whose violence takes the form of systematically making us feel bad.” However, when it comes to anthropogenic climate change, it seems as though the default position is to seek to avoid feeling bad about it, since negative emotions are equated with pessimism and resignation, and are thus seen as barriers to positive collective action. In this paper, I draw on recent examples of global eco-fictions to think about what good can possibly come out of feeling bad. I am most keenly interested in narratives that move away from historically toxic androcentric and anthropocentric visions of care, and instead toward an ethics of connection that recognizes the porous entanglements between the human and the non-human. Embracing the negative implications of Anthropocene thinking, these narratives explore the potential of negative responses—such as guilt, remorse, and terror—to encourage positive communal action. Exhibiting eco-centric ethics of care, they invite us to consider whether the ability to feel responsible, understood fundamentally as being able to respond, might point toward negative effects as potentially generative and collective, rather than as fundamentally paralyzing and individualizing, emotions.
Getting Our Hands Dirty: Material Encounter in Sculptural Practice as a Communicator of Social Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eleanor Barrett
This paper uses original research to investigate the importance of intervention from contemporary sculptors in wider discussions about material, arguing for a practice-based approach to developing a new critical language. This will enable us to understand how artists communicate material experiences to audiences, and how this embodies urgent social discourses. Material is the subject of current debates in sociology, philosophy and feminism: it can expose imbalances of power and social hierarchies. In contemporary sculpture, there is an emerging trend which draws on the politics embedded in material. Artists are immersing themselves in innovative material-led practice, using it to transmit information about their socio-economic status and to question social truths. Constant polarization of material and theory means that art writing is ill-equipped to reflect contemporary sculpture, and understanding of its direct social impact is reduced. Three key points are made. First, the lack of discourse surrounding material in sculptural theory is evidenced in discussions of key critics since the 1960s, namely Rosalind Krauss and Lucy Lippard. Second, the importance of creating space for material in art criticism is identified from analysis of current debates which are directly influencing art, including Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism. Most importantly, the case is then made that that artists are crucial contributors, due to their encounters with material in an experimental studio context. This claim is substantiated from the analysis of interviews with sculptors, placing artists at the centre of a new critical language for sculpture which acknowledges material as communicator of current social dialogues.
Ritwik Ghatak’s and Glauber Rocha’s Experimentalisms and Theorizations of Political Films: A Global South Complementarity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Else R. P. Vieira
This paper will approximate the blend of formal innovation and political commitment in two Global South monumental auteurs: Bengali Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) and Brazilian Glauber Rocha (1939-1981). It will demonstrate that Ghatak’s sense of historical urgency translated into a ground-breaking film language in the contexts of the Post-Partition crisis and later Independence is comparable to that of Cinema Novo, Brazil’s parallel cultural signifier whose main exponent is Rocha. Further advancing a complementary of their theorization, it will revisit Rocha’s 1964 masterpiece Black God White Devil (1964) and respective teleology of history impelled by the spirit of rebellion through Ghatak’s striking metalanguage on the value of silence in film. Conversely, it will approach Ghatak’s momentous 1973 A River Called Titas via Rocha’s ground-breaking theorization, “An Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965).
