Situated Practice
When Fear Stops Winning: Women's Empowerment and the Art for Social Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pilar A Kasat
Women’s Empowerment and the Art for Social Change Against the backdrop of a highly unequal and volatile world, hundreds of artists, activists and communities create art as a way of making sense of their realities, challenging the status quo and imagining new ways of being. Art for Social Change (ASC) is an emerging community-based creative practice associated with social justice and the empowerment of communities. Inspired by thinkers from the Global South, these emancipatory practices have become broadly accepted, seen as contributing to community participation and as a way of engaging with marginalised communities. This paper centres on the processes of ASC in the context of a colonial settler society and First Nations Women. From a feminist perspective of racialized women from the Global South and using a case study of Aboriginal women in Western Australia, this paper examines how ASC unfolds at the intersection of complex racial relations, where art making and story-telling shapes unique possibilities for personal and community connection. The paper argues that whilst the ongoing dominant power relations embedded in Australian coloniality continue to be extremely challenging, the processes of ASC encourage Aboriginal women to find their own voices when anchored in their culture, identity, and sense of place. The paper further demonstrates that ASC can be empowering and decolonizing especially for women, as it encourages them to use their own arsenal of gendered resilience to foster resistance to domination, as well as critical hope, through the reinvention of personal narratives.
Valuing Intuition, Reflection and Experimentation: Teaching Students to Fail, Take Risks and Learn as a Catalyst for Social Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vaughan Rees, Arianne Rourke
This paper discusses a cyclic theoretical learning framework for reflecting on a designer’s pathway where innovation and intuition play a major role in the design process. It will investigate the role that serendipity, intuition and reflection play in the learning process as transferable skills, undervalued in higher education (Durland, 1999). A personal cultural filter once made explicit can shape a lens through which a student becomes the main instrument of their own research and creative production. For the student to become a critical self-reflector they need some navigation and a learning environment where they can feel supported in imagining creative outcomes and attempting by trail and error how such an outcome could physically exist. The personal reward rises from making explicit the process they employ and multiple possibilities such a process generates either by mistake, intention or surprise. The experience of such then builds a creative visual vocabulary and memory from which to make future decisions. The sharing of this experience of processing ideas through materials and technologies with fellow students becomes a collective learning experience. Through a discussion of two case studies, various models of rethinking, reflecting and re-evaluation are outlined and visualised. The generalisation of this approach will be discussed in regard to teaching tertiary design students how to visualise their problem-solving of real-life issues where lessons learnt from failure are as valued as a resolved design solution.
The Texture of Light: Diffractive Practices, Materiality, and Contexts of Emplacement
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sara Buoso
This paper addresses an inquiry on the role of light in contemporary arts in view of modern technologies and practices posing into question the legacy of the Enlightenment. This paper suggests that contemporary artistic practices have significantly elaborated an autonomous language of light that away from the symbolic function of the heliotropic metaphor, reclaims an ethical and material approach to light that is indissolubly embedded with the socio-cultural contexts where it applies. Drawing upon Cathryn Vasseleu’s reading of a ‘texture of light’ (1998), this paper proposes a genealogy of practices of light in the contemporary and discusses how technology has become the language of communication, belonging, and coexistence prior to representation and signification. By reading light as texture, this paper proposes an inquiry upon light as a system of multiplicity, difference, and unilateral relations. In support of this argument, this paper proposes a reading of the awarded film 'Sunstone', 2017, by artists Louis Anderson and Filipa Cesar, commissioned by Gaswork, London. Through this work, this paper will discuss how textures of light can become a catalyst for social change. In particular, this paper reads how the practice of light can become strategic for new modes of thinking through practices of diffraction, communicability, materiality, and emplacement. A reading of 'Sunstone' will be relevant to an ethical inquiry upon light and the impact of medial arts in socio-cultural contexts.
