Creative Practice Showcases
Jagiellonian University
Youth Participatory Murals in Urban City Jakarta: Magnifying Young People's Voices for Peacebuilding View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Vina Puspita
Murals in Jakarta have increased significantly since the city hosted the 2018 Asian Games. Murals were painted on the streets at the governor's request to promote events and improve the city's image. However, the majority of the murals serve only to beautify the area and do not represent the community's voice. Although murals are becoming more popular among Jakarta residents, murals and young people continue to face prejudice due to vandalism. In response, a participatory mural project with youth in public spaces was proposed and carried out in collaboration with the local sub-district. This practice-based research is part of the international arts-based project Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP). It aims to offer new perspectives on murals as a means of channelling youth voices, allowing them to participate in the mural-making process, and fostering a dialogue between youth and policymakers about youth issues. This project included 35 youths from the Children's Forum who attended 6-week workshop sessions. Based on participatory approach, it encouraged participants to take an active role in art and decision-making, identifying youth issues, discussing mural themes, and engaging in mural painting process. Their mural work was presented to the local government in order to spark discussion. This participatory mural project demonstrates how murals, as a form of art in public spaces, have the potential to bring people together and serve as a space for collective thought. More importantly, they can use what they describe to create dialogue about a topic or community issue, overcome prejudice, and influence policy.
Listening in Socially-engaged Art: Artistic Strategies for Equitable Collaboration View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Hannah Kemp Welch
Socially-engaged art projects are rarely initiated by the communities they seek to serve. Though arts organisation’s efforts (consultation, co-production and partnership models) go some way to address this, inequality often remains ingrained in projects from their inception. As a practitioner and researcher, my work critically reviews tensions around participation, ownership and representation in such projects, seeking strategies that respond to and mitigate issues of inequality within artist-community relationships. My research proposes ‘listening’ as a collective practice, generative for creative endeavours with others. Interviews conducted with community artists reveal that listening is a central to a socially-engaged practice, though how and when this listening occurs is nebulous for many. Sound arts theory proposes distinct models of listening as an artistic practice (embodied, deep, imaginative etc), which I take these out of the abstract and develop within new contexts. My research proposes tangible and effective ways to listen that can support equitable creative relationships. This creative practice showcase shares case studies from my practice-based research, trialling protocols for ‘collective listening’ within social art projects. My research shows that this methodology can be used to dissect power dynamics between communities, artists and practitioners, and serve as a levelling tool in social art projects. My presentation will take the form of a performance lecture, with sounds (a ‘polyvocal’ model, bringing together multiple voices and views), slides (accessible: showing short quotes and images) and distributed scores (printed invitations to explore the methodologies discussed beyond the conference).
A Bowl For Food: An Artistic Prototype for Social Justice Reform View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Amy Leshinsky, Marina Caspe
Art has the ability to transform lives, and this website is an artifact that provides agency to artists and empowers them to be change agents for social justice. This fascinating and valuable project charts the humanitarian struggle of bringing aid to malnourished children and employs art as a vehicle to disseminate knowledge and encourage action in the public sphere. With more than 10 million children suffering from malnutrition in African countries, the vision of this work is to unite artists worldwide and empower them to seek change. This project blends technology, education, and art in an effort to have a large reaching impact on the global community. A gap that exists in research is how the art community can have a unified presence in altering social justice issues on a global scale. As a result, A Bowl for Food was created as a research-based prototype to provide artists a way tackle the humanitarian crisis of malnutrition. This website was constructed after reviewing research in the field, and the resulting artifact should be replicated with other art forms and organizations. Ultimately, this project, embedded in research and with a lens toward social justice, can provide artists the ability to use their work to be change agents and provide knowledge to the general public about the global malnutrition crisis, which will make a difference in the lives of struggling children.
