Session 3: Collaboration as a Critical Practice How can we teach it?
Socially engaged art is not only an intervention within a specific community but also a self-reflective practice. While community art projects often come with ethical challenges, these are often overlooked in art education curriculums. How can we learn from these practices and bring them back to our classrooms and into our curriculum? What should a critical, self-reflective practice look like? What educational tools are lacking in the teaching of community engagement that can inform artistic practices outside of art spaces? In this concluding session, we aim to identify support systems that help, guide, and train us for the type of work we are doing — and expected to do.
Choose Your Collective Adventure: How to Plan a Participatory Art Project
Dorit Naaman
We tend to consider art as the result of the unique vision and creative control of an individual artist. In contrast, participatory or collaborative art projects raise many practical and ethical questions. How do we create a shared vision? How do we resolve conflict or disagreement? Who makes decisions?
In this hands-on workshop we will use the Mapping Participatory Media tool to think through issues of power dynamics, desired impact, and various models of authorship. Participants in the workshop will be introduced to the tool and will use it through role-playing exercise embodying a group of stakeholders embarking on a collaborative project and trying to work out the terms of the collaboration.
Workshop: On Curriculum Building: The Missing _The Needed
How can we collaborate? Nubuke (Ghana)_ Angewandte Project, 2012 – 2023
The workshop takes as its point of departure a collection of observations, experiences and reflections shared by all persons participating in the symposium.
If we take care to give appropriate attention to collaborative processes and to methods of inclusion in our artistic and scholarly work, and if we show respect for and take interest in the complexity and diversity of cultures of knowledge that exist, what do we recognize as being an essential prerequisite, as being abilities and forms of methodological knowledge that are necessary in order for us to be able to cooperate effectively? What can foster a critical, self-reflective practice? What impact do these insights have on the curriculum?
The workshop idea of the missing resonates with participative projects launched by the artist Barbara Holub (World Congresses of the Missing Things).