Artful Activism
The artful activism toolkit is based on the findings of the workshops, exhibits, residencies, research and trainings that have taken place as part of the projects developed by the development alternatives network of artists, activists and academics.
The toolkit focuses on the processes that were distinct from other creative activism projects, highlighting how the teams worked to unsettle standard ways of understanding development and the way we do activism. The toolkit is designed for activists, human rights defenders and development workers to support their use of arts based methods to expand their work.
Bodymap: Graphic designer Kazi Istel
about the toolkit
In the toolkit, we describe several of the creative methods and art forms we trialed with researchers and practitioners to break out of traditional roles, articulate aspirations, and enlarge the scope of what ‘development’ might mean.
Approaching research like an artist making art — noticing, pattern-spotting, distilling, slipping in and out of performance, and deferring to the different expertise and skills in the room — gives researchers and practitioners tools for seeing the world in different ways and expanding their work together.
“As an ActionAider, I’m interested in knowing what we can do differently to harness the power of arts and activism. I believe there is so much that we can do to learn, unlearn and relearn to advance how we work with artists. It takes me back to the workshop we had … where activists felt we were closing their space with our various policies and restrictions. In short, we are doing NGOisation of arts even before we fully embrace and understand their work or utilize the fullness of their potential in our campaigns and advocacy.”
Body map: ‘Badhon’ Taslima Akter’
Involving an artist
Body map: Shohrab Jahan
Artists model alternative ways of working that provoke reflection. They think a lot about the pieces they end up making - the materials they use, where the ideas are coming from, how the piece might be understood by different audiences, and how this connects to their broader body of work. They have to bring the personal into their work to make something meaningful, “to be present”. An extended result of this is that many artists expect to live as they work and consequently their lifestyle and working processes become an embodiment of their politics. The activists found this blurring of the professional and personal, and expression of lived politics, refreshing and inspiring.
Making art together
Body Map: Zahed Ali Chowdhury
Approaching your work like an artist making art — noticing, pattern-spotting, distilling, slipping in and out of performance and deferring to the different expertise and skills in the room — gives participants tools for seeing the world in different ways.
Making art helps us to escape from the usual scripts, references, ‘epistemologies’ and habits we live within; we tap into the rich artistic heritage of the places that we come from and into local cultural expressions of dignity, resistance, claim-making and utopias that can shed new light on old problems. While art making isn’t a panacea for the new, the hope is that this joint experience of making together will enable a group to say things in new ways and open out new territory for their activism.
“Enlarge the field from which the unexpected can emerge ”
Thinking like an artist
Body map: Sheala Sharmin
The toolkit draws from theory as well as experimentation to help activist teams to flesh out and put into play, unpick and contextualise some of the more challenging ideals of current activist practise; to operationalise feminist leadership and working practises, innovate within their programmes and articulate development alternatives - with a vision to opening up civil society space.
Given the complex histories we all live within, theoretical prompts helped participants to frame their conversations in the context of what has come before, and imagine different possibilities for the future.
In particular the project focused in on the value of resurfacing and reflecting on different cultural archives e.g. stories, poetry, visual and oral motifs and memories. The toolkit describes several ‘creative pedagogies’ that we trialled together to make use of the potential of these archives to help disrupt dominant historical and imaginative paradigms and create space for the articulation of alternatives.
“Every literary student is an historian of some sort...we need to engage with the voices that came before and how they saw the world...and point of view. Who is gazing at whom? Who is responding to whom...and then the different perceptions, different points and different positions.”
Reading art
Body map: ‘Keep space between things’ Zihan Karim
Whether they are ‘site-specific’ performance artists who respond to the site they are working in, or artists who regularly exhibit in traditional ‘white cube’ gallery spaces, artists think about their audience’s perspective. Their work is a two-way process. Everyone has a unique perspective and the artworks prompt responses that reveal aspects of these differences.
Many participatory art making projects and workshops don’t reflect on the work they make, what a difference the framing makes and how it is understood by others. But collective reflection is an important process for producing the more critical conversations that allows groups to see for themselves the limitations of their existing ways of being, seeing and behaving.
Working collaboratively
Body map: ‘Puppet head’ Atiqul Islam
Making art together models new ways of being, sharing and working together that provide useful models. Artists often work in collaborations, but their approach to working together is slightly different from participatory approaches traditionally used amongst activists, development workers and human rights defenders - in particular by emphasising the distinct skills of each person in a team rather than their representative capacity.
Workshops were accompanied by a form of team ethnography (ethnography is the practice of studying people in their own environment, usually through direct observation and participation). The team researched the perspectives and political imaginations of those who produced, sustained and consumed art in their working context, both in the wider world and through interviews and discussions, and reflected on their findings together.
Several of the participants visited arts and activist spaces together, as well as key national sites and institutions including museums, galleries, archives, artist studios, street shows, workshops, performances, and memorials. This is an important process for providing more informal conversations to take place within the team, developing new ideas and shaping projects in relation to a specific arts based working context.
Extending creative activism
Body map: Shohrab Jahan
There are many different ways to expand your creative activism. This toolkit focuses on some of the ways we have done this in this network, thinking in particular about art as a tool for generating new conversations, challenging prevailing ways of thinking and seeing, and opening up civic space. Creative activism can also be used as a communication tool, for direct action and as an advocacy tool. In the toolkit, we point readers to some of the best resources we have come across on these themes.
Acknowledgement
All artwork on this page is based on body maps drawn at an Arts Based Reflection workshop in the Creative Alternatives project in Chittagong Fine Arts Department, Bangladesh, 2018, and the Global Platform Dhaka, 2018.
A short acknowledgment animation by Emilie Flower of the Jog Art Space collaborative model that informed and inspired this work.