The Situated Community
Women in the City Speak: Community Creative Writing Programs for Women
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lauren Kirshner
In this time of increased gendered violence, intensifying wage inequality, and rising social isolation, community creative writing programs for marginalized women can form an important site of creative resistance and change. They can provide a supportive environment for women to write stories about the realities of their lives, reverse the transmission model of learning by empowering women to become creators and public presenters, and increase the community’s understanding of the challenges and issues that shape women’s lives. This paper examines community creative writing programs for women as a catalyst for change through a case study of Sister Writes, an intersectional creative writing program for women marginalized by factors such as trauma, mental health issues, under-housing, and extraordinary life circumstances in Toronto, Canada. Since 2010, Sister Writes has mounted over 300 free workshops that provide a space for women to develop writing and leadership skills, receive mentorship from professional women writers, learn effective communication strategies to become more active members of the community, and design and lead workshops as they work collectively towards publishing and launching a literary magazine of their own creation. Drawing on a theoretical context in arts education for thinking about community creative writing programs for women, and my eight years of experience as Founding Creative Director of Sister Writes, my presentation will shed light on how creative writing programs for women – theoretically and practically - can be a catalyst for change.
The Koboi Project: Developing Translocal Engagements within Transnational Art Arenas
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Niranjan Rajah
Globalization has produced an unprecedented degree of homogenization in the mainstream of contemporary art. As artists are drawn from local contexts into the transnational markets and biennales, diverse modes of representation and communication are assimilated to a reductive lingua franca of presentation. The Koboi Project, which began in 2013, takes a photo-conceptual/ performative approach integrating family life, community, interventions, as well as discursive engagements on social media. It attempts to re-imagine art as a translocal activity within a new understanding of humanity as a technologically mediated arena of migration and settlement in which art, artists and their contexts all operate under diasporic conditions. While the Koboi Project participates in mainstream global arenas, it also insists upon a nuanced engagement with local communities and idioms. This duality of address allows me to approach art as a vocation of personal, social and metaphysical significance, while engaging in a conversation within the professional mainstream about the nature and purpose of art. In 2018, I carried out street interventions in Belem, Lisboa and in the Portuguese Village, Malacca as the basis of a photographic series titled Kaza Nunteng Porta (House Without a Door). Belem is the port from which Portuguese adventurers set sail to take Malacca in 1511 and the Portuguese Village is the last vestige of Portuguese life in contemporary Malaysia. I intend to exhibit this series in Lisboa accompanied by performances and community engagements. In this paper, I locate this series within the praxis of the Koboi Project. Series Website: https://koboibalikkampung.wixsite.com/nuntengporta
Collaborative Engagement through Inclusive Art Practices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Briege Casey, Gary Broderick
This paper concerns a collaborative arts-based endeavour between a community project (SAOL) for women affected by addiction and poverty in Dublin inner city and undergraduate nursing students in Dublin City University (DCU). This initiative was informed by calls for more meaningful collaboration with service users in health/social care practitioner education as well as the recognition of the value of narrative and art-based pedagogical approaches in such educational contexts. The SAOL community created a series of photographic images based on the findings of a community survey regarding public perceptions of poverty. This was followed by a collaborative learning workshop with student nurses and the women from SAOL, discussing the photographs and sharing stories and perceptions of poverty, mental health issues and substance use. This collaboration extended to the planning and staging of an exhibition; Object Poverty, at a range of formal venues as well as street exhibitions in Dublin city. The exhibition involved the display of the photographic exhibits accompanied by the rich responses from the workshop group and public audiences on themes and experiences of poverty. The paper discusses the process and merits of arts-based collaboration among this diverse learning group as a means of configuring and communicating complex experiences, supporting equality, promoting shared understandings and challenging stereotype and stigma. The benefits and challenges for participants involved will be considered and well as implications and opportunities for education and community arts practice.
Mapping the Disappearances of Place: Artistic Processes and Community Intervention
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Claudia Pato Carvalho
The paper reflects the action-research process under the context of the artistic creation Luto (Mourning), an artistic intervention project that is taking place in Tábua (Centro Region, Portugal), under the cultural programming project REDE ARTÉRIA, coordinated by the Portuguese theatre company O Teatrão. Reflecting the will and proposal of the local agents, the general starting point of the artistic project are the fires of the 15th of October 2017. Cartography made of layers, confessions of places, micro History, sociology of everyday life, autoethnography. The project crosses a documentary practice that involves the narratives of the residents and their relation with the historical dimension of the places, with the work on texts and other references that lead to the wider thought and questioning of the places.
