Artists and cultural animators often position themselves at the fringes of society - so they are able to remain outside and challenge what others consider normal. This could explain why in societies where we are encouraged to see ourselves as individuals, consumers and choice exercisers - artists and cultural animators have become particularly interested in art and culture as a way of exercising solidarity,
mutuality and community bonds.
In a fragmented Europe, you could say that ‘society’ has become an avant garde idea. The objective of the Participatory Action Research phase has been to explore this further and identify solidarity in cultural practices in 9 european localities.
The project has used a new methodology of ‘art based anthropology’ to identify social interactions that are oriented towards empathy and mutuality. ‘Art based anthropology’ encourages research subjects to take part in an an unusual activity that accentuates a subtle behaviour, making it distinct enough to be forensically investigated by a researcher.
We have invited artists and cultural animators interested in exposing and exploring these behaviours. To achieve this we involved Kolektyw Terenowy [Fieldwork Collective] a research team which consist of leading anthropologists of Warsaw University, leading Polish artists, curators and cultural
animators.
The organisation responsible for programming and performing action research selected a team of research supervisors consisting of 3 scholars specialised in art based anthropological action research. The team will program the research and send it for review by experts who checked the project as a steering committee.
After the Research Labs, we invited one researcher and one artist specialized inparticipatory artistic practices. Each Research Lab Team will decide upon two areas of research activities where – according to the recognition of local actors – potentiality for undiscovered social practices oriented towards mutuality, empathy, community bonds' building and solidarity could be hidden.
Each artist programmed and exercise a participatory activity, based on indications provided by researchers supervisors and experts’ panel, which would allow those practices to become more visible and better marked in terms of becoming a source material for researching concrete ways of how
solidarity is exercised.
The activities were assisted by the researcher whose role was relate to detailed analyses and descriptions of empathetic and mutual behaviours of a researched group or community.
Now you can have access to the final english version of this complex and exciting participatory-action-research. We will deliver soon also the polish and the spanish version of this document.
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