SIG 8: Facilitating

About this portal
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?
If your practice contains elements of facilitation or is driven by it, this SIG can be a forum to share questions, techniques and observations. We are interested in research and exposition approaches and in developing publication opportunities.
Organized by Marija Griniuk, Postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius Academy of Arts, and director at Sami Center for Contemporary Art in Norway; Janne-Camilla Lyster, Associate Professor, Oslo National Academy of the Arts; and Adelheid Mers, Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (coordinator).
url:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3408893/3408894
Recent Activities
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SIG 8: Facilitating as Creative Practice
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Adelheid Mers, Janne-Camilla Lyster, Marija Griniuk
connected to: SIG 8: Facilitating
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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 director at Sami Center for Contemporary Art in Norway; Janne-Camilla Lyster, Associate Professor, Oslo National Academy of the Arts; and Adelheid Mers, Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (coordinator).
Contact: sigfacilitating@gmail.com