SIG 8 Facilitating as Creative Practice
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Adelheid Mers, Fabrício Fava, Marija Griniuk
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
SIG 8: Facilitating as Creative Practice
The SIG Facilitating as Creative Practice took shape at the 2023 SAR Conference in Trondheim, having noted how frequently artists, artistic researchers and even policy makers refer to facilitation when describing interactions with peers, communities and research partners. At our inaugural meeting at the SAR Forum in Tilburg in 2024, contributors moreover shared a realization that facilitating asserted itself at a central position in our practices, even before we recognized and named it.
Facilitating practices can be identified widely in interactive and community-based art, and in theater and the performing arts, for example using games, props and improvisation. There are intersections with pedagogy and didactics, with professional facilitation and coaching, and with therapeutic work. In comparing notes, we find that we locate facilitating in conjunction with ethics and agency, with vulnerability, joy and communitas.
What does it mean to facilitate in the context of artistic research? How is facilitating integral to designing and conducting studies and research in the sciences and humanities? What is the role of a facilitator? Who agrees to participate in a facilitation setting, and why? Can facilitation be embedded in an object, a structure, a notation, or an algorithm? Which literatures and theories, which artistic practices are currently being articulated? Why is this focus emerging now? How are we drawing on a greater web?
Organized by Adelheid Mers, Marija Griniuk, and Fabrício Fava
16th International Conference on Artistic Research, University of Porto
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): 16th International Conference on Artistic Research
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Resonance:
The past decade witnessed the appearance of new debating spaces in artistic research. At a time when art and culture, local and global policies, and events are haunted by societal challenges as vast as they are unpredictable, what can artistic researchers offer in response to these concerns? How can artistic research resonate beyond its specific contexts and disciplinary borders?
Resonance is a prompt to address the transformative nature of artistic research as a connective element that evokes a response and qualifies our experiences as meaningful.
However, it can also be understood as a critical tool characterizedcharacterised by reciprocity and mutual transformation. Resonance is a response to personal and societal challenges both poetically and through modes of political imagination and transformative meeting spaces.
Getting into resonance is to create a relation between artistic research and the world that requires questioning and answering, but also the ability to change and be changed.
LANGUAGE-BASED ARTISTIC RESEARCH (SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP)
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Lena Séraphin, Cordula Daus
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Conceived and co-organised by Emma Cocker, Alexander Damianisch, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin, this Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group (SAR SIG) provides contexts for coming together via the exchange of language-based research. The intent is to support developments in the field of expanded language-based practices by inviting attention, time and space for enabling understanding of/and via these practices anew.
Adelheid Mers: Longitude
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Adelheid Mers
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Events in chronological order.
SIG 8: Facilitating as Creative Practice
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Adelheid Mers, Janne-Camilla Lyster, Marija Griniuk
connected to: SIG 8: Facilitating
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The SIG Facilitating took shape at the 2023 SAR Conference in Trondheim, after observing over an extended time how frequently artists, artistic researchers and even policy makers refer to facilitation when describing interactions with audiences, communities and research partners. Finding ways to examine such facilitating processes is crucial to the work under way.
We know that facilitating practices exist widely in interactive and community based art, and in theater and the performing arts, for example using games, props and improvisation. There are intersections with pedagogy and professional facilitation and coaching, with at least the latter understood as prizing outcomes over processes. The SIG Facilitating asks: What does it mean to facilitate as part of artistic research? Why is this focus emerging now? How are we drawing on a greater web?
Organized by Marija Griniuk, Postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius Academy of Arts and Adelheid Mers, Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (coordinator).
Contact: sigfacilitating@gmail.com
Cultural and Deliberative Public Ecologies
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Adelheid Mers
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
From 2008 - 2010, I served as an embedded artist with the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) at the City of Chicago, accompanying the development of the Digital Access Agenda, and the Smart Chicago Recovery proposal.
In 2012, a new mayor initiated a Cultural Plan process for Chicago. Invited by the director for Cultural Planning for the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, I conducted a Cultural Plan open house for attendees of the Chicago Creative Expo.
This opened a door, locally, for organizations to consider more formal inclusion of art inflected perspectives in community and urban planning processes. Between 2012 and 2014, I was invited to work with the Foundation for Homan Square, the South East Chicago Commission, the Evanston Art Center, and the arts funding organization, 3Arts. SAIC graduate students participated in all Deliberative Cultural Ecology projects.
