Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

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).