Participation tools
Tools for engaging audiences, for collaboration and co-creation, for embodying different perspectives, and for creating safe environments.
Photo: https://www.publicfaculty.org/
PUBLIC FACULTY (NL)
2008 – present
Jeanne van Heeswijk
WHAT is the practice?
Public Faculty are artistic interventions that take place in various locations, using strategies to rethink, redefine and re-enter public space through collective cultural action.
WHY was it initiated?
As we see more and more people being left out of what is often perceived as a clinical understanding of public domain, we often seem to forget that public domain is not evident. It is a source of conflict between residents, developers and governments. In the centre of these processes, and especially those where in the city life twists, cultural interventions are often the only manner in which we can actively create a public domain. Therefore, what needs to be done is to create an understanding of a given place and its dynamics and identify certain questions capable of creating a ‘performative action’.
HOW does it work?
The impetus behind Public Faculty is to learn from a place through a process of exchanging knowledge and cohabitation, and by listening to people describing their daily conditions in which they often feel trapped. It is a practice of determining how an existing conflict can be made productive by communication and by collective thinking about the situation and by making this process public. Each situation is different, but what they have in common is that they are local and specific embodiments of larger conflicts about who should be responsible and care for our common space, and whether forms of solidarity are imaginable.
KEY TOOLS:
- Participation tools
- Dialogue tools
Learn more:
Photo: zURBS
zURBS (CH)
2011 – 2020
Sabeth Tödtli, Nina Lund Westerdahl, Cecilie Sachs Olsen
WHAT is the practice?
zURBS is a socially engaged artistic collective that involves a wide range of participants in imaginative and creative processes that question what urban space means and is.
WHY was it initiated?
zURBS was based on a belief in the empowering creativity of collective action and shared ideas. The collective aimed to investigate and work with the social and material space of the city, using performative methods that suited its complexity. The intention was to enable urban inhabitants to identify and negotiate power imbalances attached to imaginaries regarding space, self and other, and thus foster a re-imagination of urban space.
HOW does it work?
Participants are recruited through “netwalking”– a form of networking involving walking around the neighbourhood, knocking on doors, establishing contact with specific organizations, institutions, individuals or groups that are located in the area, and inviting them to take part in the project. As part of the project, participants are sent out “in the field” with various tasks: to search for “invisible aspects” of their surroundings (e.g. elements that restrict their access to the city, that makes the city feel like a nightmare, that manifests the connections between people in the city); to search for “hidden treasures” (e.g. anything from beautiful views to traces of other people, from imagined encounters to places that functions as theatre stages for social drama); to search for objects that document the “here&now” of the place to be put in a time capsule for the future and so on.
KEY TOOLS:
- Participation tools
- Fieldwork tools
Learn more:
https://www.part-urbs.com/anthology/invisible_zurichs.html
https://criticalspatialpractice.co.uk/a-walk-in-your-words-25-01-2019/
Photo: Landing
LANDING (NO)
2011 - present
Venke Marie Sortland, Ida Gudbrandsen
WHAT is the practice?
Introducing children and youth to principles from dance and theatre practice aimed at incentivizing them to focus on the somatic, and physical experience. The practice is site specific and the performative event is social with emphasis on exchange, interaction and co-creation. For the work to be co-creative, the artists need knowledge about the site and its users. This is done through rehearsals on site (often schools) where the borders between process and product, rehearsal and presentations float into each other.
WHY was it initiated?
To explore body- and movement-based work in interaction with children and youth to experience their school environments in new ways through sensorial experiences and “strange” interactions. Landing blurs the distinction between co-creator/ collaborator and participant/audience. The kids take all of these positions simultaneously.
HOW does it work?
Landing invites themselves into schools as artists in residency. Last year into a High School in Oslo (Ullern VgS). They rehearse and do their daily dance practice in the different spaces at the chosen premise. Their dance practice unfolds through encounters with students, their time schedules, and the building. They call it a form of “dance missionary” where they try to “get the dance into all places and spaces it can possibly seep into”. They start with workshops with students or pupils, and from that artistic responses are developed for the students to experience in their own environments. At other times they have intervened into a primary school with dancers and huge objects for a whole day. Pupils are invited to collaborate in altering the common spaces and places in the school.
KEY TOOLS:
- Participation tools
- Teaching tools
- Fieldwork tools
Learn more:
https://journals.oslomet.no/index.php/ar//article/view/3753/3951
Photo: Paide Theatre
POETIC CONSULTATIONS (FRA/EST)
2021
Théâtre de la Ville de Paris/Paide Teater
WHAT is the practice?
Poetic Consultation is an initiative started by Théâtre de la Ville de Paris. They have partners all over the world and in Estonia the initiative was carried out by Paide Theatre. The consultation is a 20-minute 1:1 conversation with an artist with the aim of active listening and creating a connection through artistic means. At first, the consultations were carried out over the phone but as the pandemic’s threat lessened, the consultations were taken into public space.
WHY was it initiated?
The consultations were initiated as a way to maintain a link between the artist and the audience but also to offer a chance to connect with someone, to make someone feel like they have been heard and understood. Since their launch in France in March 2020, the consultations have developed around the world thanks to the support of numerous partner structures and institutions in Europe, Asia and Africa. The troupe de l'imaginaire now includes 90 foreign artists - actors, musicians or dancers - in 17 countries. These artists, all individually trained, are committed to the populations and offer poetic, musical or danced consultations to all, in the public space, in the heart of the cities.
HOW does it work?
The artists are either in public spaces, where individuals can freely approach them or call people who have signed up before. A roughly 20-minute conversation follows, starting with the question “How are you?”. By the end of the conversation, the artist chooses a poem specifically for the person they were talking to based on their conversation and performs it to them. The consultations are free of charge.
KEY TOOLS:
- Participation tools
- Dialogue tools
Learn more:
https://www.theatredelaville-paris.com/en/projets-passerelles/les-consultations
https://youtu.be/C5iQ2q3a-Z4?si=uUvUXJO9KE8K7anl