Project Unité a Firminy. L’arte nel dispositivo urbano e architettonico

PurposeIn Flanders, the subventions in the cultural sector are mainly divided and decided upon within the framework of the Arts Decree. Within this policy framework, art organizations may choose in their funding applications for “participation” as one of the five possible functions to describe their artistic and cultural practices. However, questions need to be raised about the different interpretations of the notion of participation within this policy framework. The growing trend of evidence-based policy-making implies that participation risks to become a “target” that needs to be achieved instrumentally, which paradoxically ignores the fact that participatory practices within culture and the arts are very often diverse, multi-layered and context-specific practices. Starting from this paradox, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the current policy framework is translated into different “participatory” art practices by art organizations and specifically how cultural practitioners themselves conceptualize it.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors discuss the results of a qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews with cultural practitioners about how they grapple with the notion of participation within their organizations and practices.FindingsThe results clearly show that practitioners use micro-politics of resistance to deal with different, and often conflicting, conceptualizations of participation in relation to this cultural policy framework.Research limitations/implicationsThe implications of the findings are vital for the discussion about cultural policy. These micro-politics of resistance do not only have an impact on the development of individual participatory art practices but also on the broader participatory arts landscape and on how the function of participation is perceived within the renewed policy framework.Originality/valueThe original contribution of this paper is to explore the perspective of practitioners in cultural organizations about the function of participation in the Arts Decree in Flanders and specifically how the notion of participation is operationalized in their practices in relation to this cultural policy framework.

This article will describe Collective Encounters’ participatory practice and situate it within the field of Theatre for Social Change (TFSC). It will argue that in the current political climate TFSC can be a useful tool of opposition. The article will chart the company’s radicalization and call for a repoliticization of the participatory arts sector. It will explore how theatre can contribute to social justice in the context of austerity, how it can challenge the ubiquitous neo-liberal narrative, and what kinds of participatory arts practices might aid the global movement for radical change. Collective Encounters is a professional arts organization specializing in TFSC. The company is based in north Liverpool, an area of extreme disadvantage, ranked among the top ten in England’s Indices of Multiple Deprivation (DCMS 2011). It works with diverse marginalized communities both here and in the wider North West: many participants are casualties of the prevailing system and feel the direct impact of benefit cuts and the shrinking of the state. Collective Encounters is a small charity employing seven staff members and additional freelance artists as required. It is governed by a board of directors and has a formal legal company structure. The company provides all its work free at the point of use, and thus is dependent on public funding as well as on grants from trusts and foundations. Since 2004, Collective Encounters has maintained three strands to its work: a participatory programme, a professional theatre programme and a research lab. The company is driven by a research imperative to explore ways in which theatre can contribute to the world-wide ‘multitude of opposition’1, working towards greater social justice and against global corporate capitalism’ (Thornton 2015: 2). Over the past five years it has shifted from a liberal to a radical change agenda, and has conducted academic, practical and sectoral research in order to understand and define its field. It has thus identified TFSC as a discernable set of practices by drawing out five key characteristics: intentionality, community, hyphenation, conscientization and aesthetics. While individually they are not unique to TFSC, taken together they frame the field; they are the driving forces behind Collective Encounters thinking and provoke the ethical dilemmas with which the company grapples. They provide an interesting lens through which to view participatory arts practice within the current social and political climate.

Claire Bishop argued that the ethical lens applied to socially engaged arts practice encourages ‘authorial renunciation’ in favour of collaboration and limits the opportunity to expose such practice to critical reception. This article responds to Bishop’s implicit call to envision an artist-centred framework for participatory arts by identifying the motivations and beneficial discoveries that artists make when they seek out the creative involvement of others. Based on interviews with Australian performing artists who have established socially engaged practices, the article aims to bring about a form of ‘authorial reinstatement’ into the value system around participatory arts practice. It identifies a range of motivations for artists who establish socially engaged or participatory practice, from self-developmental to altruistic; and from arts-focused to community- and society-focused. The article argues that using these motivations to inform indicators of achievement for participatory practice provides new opportunities for critical interrogation of those practices.

The aim of this PhD research was to examine what happens when mischievous street theatre performers are deliberately agonistic in the public realm in the United Kingdom. The PhD practice-based research is contextualised by Chantal Mouffe’s political theory of agonism, and the instances in which she applies agonism to art practice (2001-2013). The research is led by the question How can mischievous and participatory performance facilitate politicised dissent? In this research, art practice is a method of research, and central to the methodology of argumentation using both theory and practice. The art practice takes the form of guerrilla street theatre.<br> The art practice adapts L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel <i>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i> because of the opportunities Oz presents to initiate and facilitate public discussions about power and conflict through the structure of a journey. In this version, Lion [the doctoral researcher Antoinette Burchill], Tinman, and Scarecrow become exiled leaders who want to return home to Oz. In order to be allowed back, they must learn how to be fair and just leaders. The only way the characters can gain this information is by asking those they meet on their journey for advice. Therefore, public participation is a vital aspect of the performance. Each character leads with the quality the Wizard gave them with in Baum’s original novel: Lion with courage, Tinman with heart, and Scarecrow with brains. Consequently, each character interprets the advice they receive from participants with a particular bias. This ensures that conflict is a potential component of every performance. Baum’s motif of the yellow brick road as a journey full of obstacles and challenges is adapted to suit strolling guerrilla street theatre in the public realm.<br> The guerrilla street performances were planned and developed in Spring-Summer 2015, the performances took place over one day in Hackney and London Fields, East London in August 2015. The film clips are titled as Episodes in order to emphasis the iterative nature of the street performances. Only Episodes with ethical approval from participants are included in the Collection.<br> Episodes 4, 8, 9, 11, and 13 were explored through argumentation, analysis and reflections on performance in Antoinette Burchill’s doctoral thesis. The practice is archived as it holds a value for other researchers, especially those examining the difficulties and complexities of agonistic art practices. <br>The License for all items is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. If you wish to negotiate a different license to aid your research, please contact Antoinette Burchill directly.

Participatory art practices promote public involvement or participation as part of the entity that will assist the artist to create the artwork. The participative type approach seems challenging the usual practices of the artist, even the artistic outcomes or artform or artwork will be in different contexts. The study was to identify a gap remains in understanding the influence and purpose from the participant that can lead to their participation. It was focusing on the participants’ perception as a co-creator in participatory art practices. Data was gathered from questionnaires posed to respondents who participated in the conducted participatory art project. The thematic analysis was used to identify the participant purpose of involvement in participatory art. Result found that the participation from the public was based on self-inclination and their engagement in the activity contribute significantly to the socially engaged context. Public engagement in participatory art has encouraged the happening of a constructive relationship between the artist and the proposed concept.

Among Auguste Perret's papers is a letter from Le Corbusier thanking him for a brief holiday spent in the south of France in May 1915 as Perret's guest. The importance of this visit for the development of Le Corbusier's Dom-ino project has been noted by several writers. It is, however, important in another way. The holiday was spent at Saint-Clair, near Le Lavandou, the home of the painter Theo van Rysselberghe, who had lent it to Perret so that he might recuperate from an illness (Fig. 1). At Saint-Clair, escaping from a cold Swiss spring and the unfolding horror of the war, and surrounded by works of art, Le Corbusier discussed architecture with his former teacher in a setting of unspoiled natural beauty. A tiny sketch contained in Le Corbusier's letter evokes the place: sea, mountains, and luxuriant vegetation viewed through the enormous window of a studio filled with paintings and objets d' art. Here, it seems, Le Corbusier's fascination with the world of art was incubated; significantly, it occurred under the aegis of Perret.

This article reflects upon the process, the challenges and the opportunities realised in the recent revalidation activity of an undergraduate degree programme in Creative and Therapeutic Arts (CTA) in the UK. The premise of the revalidation activity and the historical context of the course are briefly encapsulated, before engaging with theoretical frameworks at the forefront of contemporary Participatory Arts practice. This includes an initial focus on the relevance of Critical Disability Studies to Participatory Arts education, followed by exploration of the contrasting approaches of Socially Engaged Art practice, Inclusive Arts practice, Participatory Arts practice, Arts in Health and Arts Therapies. The challenge of defining a diverse practice which draws from such contrasting perspectives is further explored in relation to the challenge of working on the boundary between artistic and therapeutic practice. Geographical context is considered, drawing from the Welsh evidence base to inform culturally relevant provision. Curriculum design is reviewed in relation to experiential learning and inclusive practice literature, as well as relevant higher education policies. Upon briefly summarising the revalidated curriculum, a critical discussion around the future of the training and the discipline more broadly is developed, considering the contribution of the critical review and focus groups facilitated as part of this revalidation activity. It is hoped that this discussion will further nurture and challenge educators, students and practitioners in this exciting area of evolving, contemporary practice.

This article examines AI as an artistic medium through people-centred, practice-based research with student practitioners at OP Jindal Global University, who developed speculative responses to the archives and context of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Through a seven-week collaborative programme led by the Electronic Life Research Studio, three groups created experimental prototypes responding to provocations around affective data, spatial mapping, and unofficial knowledge. Rather than implementing finished systems, participants used speculative prototyping to interrogate how authority, accessibility, and voice operate within cultural documentation. Drawing on participatory art practice and collaborative research, the article centres student practitioners’ reflections, positioning them as co-researchers whose making generates knowledge about AI's possibilities and limitations. Their work reveals approaches that are distributed rather than hierarchical, conversational rather than authoritative, and grounded in embodied experience. The first group explored capturing ephemeral encounters through alternative documentation; the second mapped connections between the Biennale and Kochi's broader histories; the third examined boundaries between official and unofficial knowledge through concept notes and translation. Together, these projects show how people-centred approaches to AI can foreground place, participation, and marginal voices, offering insights for cultural institutions seeking more democratic engagement and contributing to discourse on participatory practice and AI as artistic material.

An argument that the collaborative multimedia projects produced by Stan VanDerBeek in the 1960s and 1970s anticipate contemporary new media and participatory art practices. In 1965, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) unveiled his Movie-Drome, made from the repurposed top of a grain silo. VanDerBeek envisioned Movie-Drome as the prototype for a communications system—a global network of Movie-Dromes linked to orbiting satellites that would store and transmit images. With networked two-way communication, Movie-Dromes were meant to ameliorate technology's alienating impulse. In The Experience Machine, Gloria Sutton views VanDerBeek—known mostly for his experimental animated films—as a visual artist committed to the radical aesthetic sensibilities he developed during his studies at Black Mountain College. She argues that VanDerBeek's collaborative multimedia projects of the 1960s and 1970s (sometimes characterized as “Expanded Cinema”), with their emphases on transparency of process and audience engagement, anticipate contemporary art's new media, installation, and participatory practices. VanDerBeek saw Movie-Drome not as pure cinema but as a communication tool, an “experience machine.” In her close reading of the work, Sutton argues that Movie-Drome can be understood as a programmable interface. She describes the immersive experience of Movie-Drome, which emphasized multi-sensory experience over the visual; display strategies deployed in the work; the Poemfield computer-generated short films; and VanDerBeek's interest, unique for the time, in telecommunications and computer processing as a future model for art production. Sutton argues that visual art as a direct form of communication is a feedback mechanism, which turns on a set of relations, not a technology.

Communities and networks constitute complex socio-cultural ecosystems wherein participatory design and art practices assume a central role in fostering collaborative creativity and addressing collective challenges. The infusion of participatory design into these networks serves as a catalyst for social innovation, facilitating the active engagement of community members in co-creating their shared environments. Social design emerges as a strong tool, transcending disciplinary boundaries to harness the capacities of art and design in responding to intricate societal issues. This interplay between participatory design and art practices becomes a dynamic mechanism instigating positive transformations within communities, fostering diverse perspectives and inclusive solutions. University-level students can play a crucial role in the convergence of art and design activism, enhancing the impact of interventions with a socio-political dimension. As active participants in civic engagement through art and design, these students become vital advocates for social justice, contributing substantively to community empowerment and proactive determination of future trajectories. The genesis of the "O Bairro está IN(clusivo)" [The Neighborhood is IN(clusive)] project exemplifies this synergy. Promoted by ESAD — College of Art and Design and rooted in the principles of dream, imagination, fabulation, and self-build, the project endeavors to contribute to societal betterment through design and architecture, emphasizing positive transformation of Cruz de Pau's (social housing community in Matosinhos, Portugal) urban space through active community participation. Financed under the “Healthy Neighborhoods Program”, a governmental initiative to enhance the quality of life in vulnerable territories, the project focuses on Cruz de Pau—a neighborhood with diverse demographic profiles and varying economic and social needs. The project engages in workshops and participatory activities involving three generations —seniors, young people, and adolescents —, aiming to improve the surrounding space and leverage local knowledge. Through art and creativity, the project activates social and urban "regeneration," fostering participation and identification between inhabitants and their surroundings, while showcasing the effective transformative power of a united community.

The project of a residential building (unit) of a proper size (unité de grandeur conforme) was designed in Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris from the late 1940s on. Prepared by Jerzy Sołtan and Gerard Hanning, it was a theoretical model and was meant to be an answer to the shortage of housing after World War Two; it would also solve the functional program in an innovative way and at the same time would be based on the principles of the contemporary architecture created by Le Corbusier. For Le Corbusier, a very important part of the project was the spatial solution of the utilitarian roof. Essential elements here were: the landscape of the south of France, its scenic connections, spatial relationships and the silhouette of the City of Marseilles: these were called basic joys (joies essentielles), which should belong to everybody. The paper shows the histories of three buildings embodying the idea of the total housing unit: the prototype - the Marseilles Unit, its late copy - the Berlin Unit, and the Polish realization designed and built in Katowice by Mieczysław Król.

The project of a residential building (unit) of a proper size (unite de grandeur conforme) was designed in Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris from the late 1940s on. Prepared by Jerzy Soltan and Gerard Hanning, it was a theoretical model and was meant to be an answer to the shortage of housing after World War Two; it would also solve the functional program in an innovative way and at the same time would be based on the principles of the contemporary architecture created by Le Corbusier. For Le Corbusier, a very important part of the project was the spatial solution of the utilitarian roof. Essential elements here were: the landscape of the south of France, its scenic connections, spatial relationships and the silhouette of the City of Marseilles: these were called basic joys (joies essentielles), which should belong to everybody. The paper shows the histories of three buildings embodying the idea of the total housing unit: the prototype – the Marseilles Unit, its late copy – the Berlin Unit, and the Polish realization designed and built in Katowice by Mieczyslaw Krol.

When considered as an artistic process, art questions the art problematism of the audience in the place of consumer, where the boundaries between art and real life are blurred, and the connection between them through the work of art. Art forms the precursors of fictions where the distant and uncertain relationship between the work and the audience is centered on mutual communication with new artistic approaches as an intervener/participant in artistic practice. In the first quarter of the 20th century, it is realized that the audience should be included in the work in order to remove the boundaries in the formative process of the work of art by taking an opposing attitude on the strict boundaries of the artist and the art work. As a matter of fact, the process that started with avantgarde formations in the early 1900s completely changed the nature of the relationship between the art work and the audience with the artistic practices of the 1960s. In the 1990s, the increasingly widespread audience-oriented participatory art practices initiated a period in which the audience was interactively involved in the performance and evolved into relationality with new approaches with active participation. In this direction, while the changing art practices in the historical process of Performance Art have evolved into new trends, placing the audience in a participatory/active position, the formation of relational-oriented new expressions will be examined in the context of relational aesthetics, the roles of artist-art work-audience interaction and new artistic understanding and formations. The idea of “togetherness” realized by participatory art according to the changing roles and practices of the audience creates a state of collective consciousness by providing an environment of socialization. Within the scope of the research, by reviewing the literature, document analysis was used as a data collection technique. In the light of the collected data, the relationality dimension of participatory art practices and the similarities, distinctions, interactions, and connections between concepts and subjects were tried to be clarified between these art formations. As a result of the research, it is seen that performance art provides a multi-disciplinary environment where the audience participates in the artistic production process, interacts and actively participates in contrast to modern art movements. Keywords: Relational art, viewer and participator, performance art, relationality

The ArtWorks programme has succeeded in generating deeper insights into the realities of participatory arts practice in the United Kingdom, in particular the conditions needed to achieve quality and the extent to which these are enabled. In parallel with ArtWorks research, in 2014 Creative Scotland commissioned a detailed analysis of the extant ‘body of knowledge’ concerning quality, which uncovered a number of generic concepts of quality held in the commercial world, which are of profound relevance to the participatory arts and the questions currently being explored by the sector. When such ‘global’ perspectives – about the inherent nature of quality, how to ‘build it in’ to a product and how to manage quality outputs – are considered alongside evidence and testimony from the sector captured by ArtWorks, several important learning points emerge: One, that quality does not reside just in the art or work undertaken with participants ‘on the day’ but stems from a holistic process consisting of several preceding phases including conception, design and planning, each of which contain quality components. Two: quality in the participatory arts is not solely determined by the artist and what they deliver ‘in the room’, but is directly affected by a range of key decision makers some of whom may be far removed from the project itself, but who nonetheless influence whether the experience of the participants is a quality one. Three: there are recognizable essential preconditions for quality that appear to be common across participatory arts practice. Many of these are outside the artist’s direct control and are often missing from projects, undermining the chances of quality experiences for participants. The seminal theory of US researchers Seidel et al. constructing the interconnectedness of decision makers provides vital context for appreciating the roles and responsibilities of a wider group of stakeholders (including commissioners, employers and funders) in the achievement of quality experiences for participants. These observations lead to important recommendations for greater stakeholder engagement and responsibility; again gaining especial pertinence in light of evidence generated by ArtWorks. This article outlines each of these points in detail, reconstructing the logical development of key insights contained in the Creative Scotland report, which was researched and written by this author. The core components of an optimum quality system are proposed and represented as features of a holistic framework.

(No) strings attached. Reassembling participatory art of the long sixties.This dissertation deals with participatory art practices that allow members of an audience to actively contribute, alone or together with others, to the bringing into being of art. The main aim of this study is to provide a detailed analysis and explanation of the use of participatory strategies in art in the so-called ‘long sixties’ (starting around 1958 and ending around 1974) in Western Europe. It examines how audience participation was actually thought and facilitated, and discusses the elements that affected these processes of thinking and doing, by focusing on three specific participatory projects, all of which were part of the fifth documenta, a groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary art held in 1972 in Kassel. With regard to a participation pavilion built by the artists John Dugger and David Medalla, a light installation by the artist Piotr Kowalski and a video project initiated by the group telewissen, the following questions are answered: How were participatory strategies incorporated in these projects and what (f)actors contributed to the emergence of these early manifestations of participatory art? How were ideas and motives concerning audience participation able to develop, circulate and, eventually, come to fruition in practice? What connections can be discerned between these instances of first-wave participatory art and other circumstances and developments in the sixties? Drawing on extensive archival materials and with the help of the theoretical and methodological toolbox of the actor-network theory, this study maps out the various actors that, together, generated these three projects and the related participatory practices.