Summary of research on artistic and cultural processes

Cynthia Cohen

Invite | Affirm | Evoke | Unleash: How artistic and cultural processes transform complex challenges is a report arising from a research initiative developed by IMPACT (The Imagining Together Platform for Arts, Culture and Conflict Transformation). It is the result of a year-long inquiry undertaken by a diverse research team, composed of ten researchers, from ten countries, including scholar/practitioners based in universities, NGOs, and cultural organizations, who wrote memos investigating theory and practice surrounding different distinctive features of engagement with and through the arts. They were encouraged to allow their thinking to be informed by their cultures, their disciplines, their practice and their experiences. Thought leaders in the ACCT field challenged initial assumptions, raised questions, and suggested resources. Conversations between thought leaders and researchers surfaced the “Invite! Affirm! Evoke! Unleash!” framework. The report also incorporates insights from theories about complexity and complex adaptive systems, and the intertwined nature of contemporary challenges.

The research team considered nine distinctive features that characterize engagement with and through arts and culture: beauty, dignity, interdependence, honesty, paradox, ambiguity, agency, creativity and multiple modes of knowing. It concludes that ethical arts and cultural processes have a transformative power that can be crafted to:

· Invite people into aesthetic experiences, aligning senses, cognition, emotions and spirit. These experiences can be crafted to engender distinctive ways of paying attention to reality, opening perception to complexities that might be difficult to face in the flow of everyday life. They engage multiple ways of thinking, sensing, feeling, imagining and meaning-making that go beyond the purely rational offering experiences of beauty. Beauty is experienced when there is a pleasurable alignment between the formal qualities of an expression and the perceptual sensibilities, capacities and preferences of those who witness and participate.

· Affirm dignity and interdependence. Ethical arts and cultural processes can be crafted to embody, evoke and engender recognition of dignity and awareness of interdependence.

Figure 1: Dancers interpret the testimony of survivors of forced marriage (institutionalized rape), a practice imposed during the years of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. By both allowing artists to retell their deeply harrowing and sometimes triumphant histories, and contributing input as the performance piece - Phka Sla - was being developed, survivors report beginning to reclaim their dignity after decades of suffering fear, shame and feelings of worthlessness. (Sophiline Arts Ensemble; Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, choreographer; Noboyuki Arai, photographer; 2018)

· Evoke feelings and honest exploration where repeated traumas and ongoing oppressions have resulted in numbness and silencing; and nourish capacities to embrace the paradox and ambiguity that characterize complexity.

Figure 2: As part of the project Un lugar en el mundo (A Place in the World), transgender women in Bogotá, Colombia, embrace and publicly celebrate the ambiguity of their position, simultaneously inside and outside of mainstream society, by placing themselves in relationship to other “extra- ordinary” women – nuns venerated in spectacular portraits on the walls of the Museums of the Banco de la República. (Portrait of Daniela Maldonado; Liliana Parra, photographer; Sebastián Mesa, art direction; copyright Banco de la República; 2018)

· Unleashes individual and collective agency and creativity.

Figure 3: The Pacific Climate Warriors call forth agency through the use of traditionally-built handmade canoes as a blockade around the largest coal port in the world. They reclaim their own narratives, presenting themselves as active cultural knowledge bearers with a right to a say about their future. (Still from Canoes vs. Coal; https://vimeo.com/1093604 66, 2014)

The report concludes with recommendations:

· Find new ways to reframe complex challenges as interconnected and move toward a culture of sustainability

· Invest more resources over longer time periods in the fields of arts and culture

· Focus on ethical, anti-oppressive, aesthetic, locally-rooted, and trauma-informed practices in artistic and cultural initiatives and beyond

· Align practices and processes with complexity, using systems-based approaches

· Meaningfully engage artists and cultural workers in decision-making spaces, especially where they historically have been excluded

· Protect freedom of expression and artists’ human rights

· Further document the power of arts and culture and gather collective insights.

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*Invite | Affirm | Evoke | Unleash research initiative was led by Dr. Cynthia Cohen, director of the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts, Brandeis University, with participation from researchers and thought leaders associated with IMPACT, the Imagining Together Platform for Arts, Culture and Conflict Transformation, and with support from the Community Arts Network, a joint venture of the Porticus and Hilti Foundations.