Session 1, May 25th, 9:00 – 12:30
Safe & Brave Spaces: How do we have difficult conversations?
Classrooms and community engagement practices have a lot to learn from one another. Both learning environments and working with communities bring together not only people from diverse backgrounds, but also divergent interests where conversation can be fraught and full of power dynamics. In order to meet these challenges, we need curricula, classrooms, and pedagogies that are responsive. In this panel, we ask how do we create safe and brave spaces to have difficult conversations in our classrooms, communities, and in public spaces? How do we make space for dissent, conflict, and grievance? How do we allow for difficult conversations to take place, safeguarding both respectful exchange and accountability to one another.
Workshop: Listening Creatively
The world seems to be calling for listeners and amplifying the importance of listening to address polarity and community decay. Yet stretching to listen from a muted distance or in order to build bridges in the face of polarization is very hard. During our time together, we’ll engage in listening creatively — listening for each other and as ourselves in the most challenging contexts. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice listening while focusing on these key questions:
§ What are our misunderstandings about listening?
§ In what ways might listening catalyze equity, inclusion, and belonging in our communities?
§ How might we cultivate cultures of listening in our schools, organizations, and communities?
§ What are a few ways to practice creative listening?
§ How might we be better audiences for each other?
This experience will allow participants to collaborate and practice as they learn, and to share emerging questions and strategies as we build our capacity as creative listeners.
Workshop: Exploring Safe/Brave Space through Embodied Inquiry
Fellow Students: Omry Batkilin, Teresa M. Braun, Judith Haslöwer, Marla Heid, Verena Miedl-Faißt, Arzu Mistry, Stephanie Spitz, Julia Stern, Jason Watson
This experiential session will explore notions of safe and brave spaces through multiple modes of embodied inquiry. Our international group of student art educators and researchers will begin by presenting our online discourse, a series of Zoom meetings that initially brought us together as a cohort and continues to shape our thoughts on how safe/brave spaces function in educational environments. Through this ongoing dialogue, we have collectively questioned the diverse meanings of safe/brave spaces against divergent cultural contexts, the sometimes conflicting roles individuals take on while navigating such spaces, the capacity (or lack thereof) of safe/brave spaces to encourage generative conversations that might reveal bias and break down prejudice, and the potential impact of these conversations might have on the broader societies beyond academic walls.
Group members will then guide participants through a set of parallel embodied workshops using drawing, free-writing, and clay construction as vehicles to explore the questions and concerns safe/brave spaces suggest. After a brief ‘gallery walk’ of our workshop outcomes, participants will regroup for a guided reflection on their experiences.
Session 2: May 25th, 14:00 – 18:00
Strategies of Engagement: What can we learn from working collaboratively with communities?
By now, there has been a decades-long tradition of community engaged art projects. We are at a particular time when diversity, equality, and inclusion are strong drivers not only of academic reorientation, but broader societal changes. These shifts are similarly present among artists working in and with communities. We are at an inflection point of evaluating strategies that do this really well and others who don’t. Looking at and learning from artists who work collaboratively with communities, what are some of the tool kits, challenges, and ethical questions we should think about when we seek to collaborate? How does diversity, the notion of inclusion, and equity play into how we think about collaboration? What knowledge or assumptions do artists bring into their work with communities? What can artists learn from the communities they work with?
Conflict and Contestation in Community Arts
Işıl Eğrikavuk
Image info: View of Federal Plaza with Tilted Arc seen from the side
Photograph by Susan Swider
Courtesy of Richard Serra
Artistic collaboration is not a smooth road to take. Art schools offer courses on the history and practice of community arts or collaborative practices, yet artists are not taught how to actually work with others. As Chantal Mouffe says, critical art should not be aimed not at creating a consensus. Yet, in everyday practice when conflict occurs, what do we do? How can artists manage conflict differently? Are there alternative methods of communication?
Shifting Grounds: Rooted in the Future
In this talk Mirna Bamieh charts her journey of creating Palestine Hosting Society as an ongoing project that lives in the reflective spaces of food and design. She will share with us how her work expanded from the space of the artist studio (video and ceramics) to include the kitchen, reflecting through her practice on questions such as: What signifies a kitchen that has been colonized for decades? What does it mean for dishes and food practices to withdraw and disappear? How does the space art provide a look in face of the violence embedded in the meticulous erasure of identity of the colonised, and their food culture? Can a practice be liberating for the artist herself/himself and the community they belong to? Can art function as a space of community self-care? Can art function as a space of community self-care?
Instances of Dizziness. Navigating Dizziness Together.
Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond
The ongoing artistic research project Navigating Dizziness Together (FWF-PEEK AR 598) proposes the liminal state of dizziness as the suspension of relation, communication and understanding. This lecture-performance by Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond explicates the concept of dizziness, giving examples from artistic works, balance training and poetry intermingling it with scientific-artistic findings. Their arts-based research defines dizziness as an unpredictable movement, or the sensation of such movement, causing a shift from the given to the uncertain that unbalances individuals, groups, societies, elements, and systems. For living beings, dizziness indicates a situation in which the possibilities of reality can no longer be grasped in the habitual manner of prediction because of a disruption, lack, or overload of input. But this situation offers the potential for change and transformation.