Socially engaged art, at its core, seeks to dismantle the traditional artist-audience binary, fostering collaborative experiences that generate knowledge and catalyze social change. Within this realm, research-creation, a methodology that blends artistic practice with rigorous inquiry, becomes a potent tool for exploring the nuanced interplay between embodiment, emergence, and relationality. Research-creation, crucially, is not simply art that illustrates research findings, nor is it research that merely analyzes art. It's a dynamic interplay where creative processes are integral to the generation of knowledge, emphasizing the investigative journey and recognizing that artistic forms can produce unique and valuable insights. It is an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. It is about the creation process being situated within the research activity and producing critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms). Rather than simply observing or documenting, artists become active participants, generating new forms of understanding through embodied action and shared experience, using methods that combine creative and academic research practices.
Embodiment in this context moves beyond the individual body as a site of expression. It acknowledges the body as a locus of lived experience, memory, and cultural inscription, deeply intertwined with social and environmental contexts. Research-creation methodologies that prioritize embodiment often involve participatory workshops, site-specific performances, or interactive installations that invite participants to engage physically with the artwork and its surrounding environment. For instance, a project exploring urban displacement might involve walking workshops that map embodied experiences of navigating contested spaces, or collaborative movement exercises that explore the feeling of being uprooted. These methodologies, through the lens of research-creation, recognize that knowledge is not solely cognitive but is also felt, sensed, and lived through the body, contributing to the development of knowledge through artistic expression.
Emergence, a concept borrowed from complex systems theory, recognizes that meaning and understanding are not pre-determined but rather arise through the dynamic interactions between participants, materials, and contexts. In socially engaged art, this translates to a research process that embraces uncertainty and allows for unexpected outcomes. Research-creation methodologies that foster emergence might involve open-ended creative prompts, iterative prototyping, or collaborative world-building exercises. Rather than seeking to control the outcome, the artist acts as a facilitator, creating the conditions for collective exploration and discovery. For instance, a community garden project might employ emergent methodologies by allowing the garden’s design and purpose to evolve organically based on the participants' needs and contributions, demonstrating how the creative process itself is a site of knowledge production.
Relationality, the understanding that all beings are interconnected and interdependent, is fundamental to socially engaged art research creation. Methodologies that emphasize relationality prioritize dialogue, collaboration, and co-creation. This might involve participatory action research (PAR), where community members are actively involved in all stages of the research process, or collaborative storytelling projects that amplify marginalized voices and foster intersubjective understanding. Relational methodologies, when approached as research-creation, recognize that knowledge is not produced in isolation but rather through shared experience and mutual respect, producing critically informed work through collaborative art forms. For instance, a project addressing environmental justice might utilize collaborative mapping techniques to visualize the interconnectedness of human and ecological systems, or employ storytelling circles to create spaces for collective healing and transformative dialogue.
By integrating embodiment, emergence, and relationality through the lens of research-creation, socially engaged art moves beyond traditional research paradigms. It embraces the subjective, the affective, and the experiential, recognizing that knowledge is not a static entity but rather a dynamic and evolving process. The artist, in this context, becomes a facilitator of shared meaning-making, creating spaces for collective learning and social transformation. Through embodied action, emergent processes, and relational encounters, socially engaged art research creation has the potential to generate new forms of knowledge that are both deeply personal and profoundly social, contributing to a more just and equitable world, with the creation process itself situated within the research activity.
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 30, 2020
The body is a place. We think of our minds and bodies as separate containers, but in fact, the mind is a part of the body. The body, in fact, is a place in which we store our memories and associations. We often think of a place as a site to encounter or experience. The same can be said about the body:
How do I encounter my body?
When do I experience my body?
For many, the answers to these questions are limited to a handful of experiences. Often we disassociate from our bodies in order to rationalize and live in a world that celebrates thinkers and in which the mind is allowed to lead. Much of the world associates the mind as the primary used muscle. In many of these cases, the answers to the above questions are left at, "Never".
The reality is that due to a series of circumstances in human history, such as patriarchy, colonization, white supremacy, heteronormativity, humanity has learned to support top-down thinking, and this, over generations, creates the belief that our minds do all the work and our bodies just tag along for the ride. Our bodies are the site of the impacts of patriarchy, colonization, white supremacy and heteronormativity. When we begin to connect the mind to the body, we can begin to sense the triggers and memories we hold in this vessel of ours. We begin to see the full site.
I struggled for a number of years, thinking that thought and ideas were the way of the future. I stumbled over articulating ideas as fully conceived concepts. Little did I know that the way my body works is in sensing and experiencing, Therefore, I can't promise that every time I open my mouth something smart is going to come out. Often times, my mouth is part of an elaborate process that my body needs in order to understand itself. It usually starts with a simple thought, that initiates my mouth speaking in real-time consciousness, while my body experiences what my thoughts are attempting to formulate. Only after I have spoken the words, do I feel. Only after I feel, do I understand. This is very different from this idea that anything coming out of our mouths has to make sense right off the bat.
This idea that the most articulate are the ones that are most celebrated is an output of patriarchy, colonization, white supremacy and heteronormativity. Hence why we get so much fragility when power is met with a request to unlearn. The unlearning requires us to experience this through the body, not just the mind. Deep in our bodies, we can all find memories of abuse of power. What would happen if we began from that place as we all attempt to unlearn patriarchy, colonization, white supremacy and heteronormativity?
All in all, this requires processing. We have assumed that the mind must learn immediately. That it is at the forefront of who we are as individuals. In fact, the body is the site of our experiences. And these experiences, are in process. Just like our words. Just like our thoughts. Just like our bodies -- ever encountering; ever activating; ever experiencing.