Moving between artistic research, cultural institutions, and community building

Danae Theodoridou

Since 2021, the professorship Artistic Connective Practices of Fontys Academy of the Arts (FAA) in Tilburg, the Netherlands, led by Falk Hübner, has been investigating how artistic research can contribute to the transformation towards a sustainable, resilient society. With a commitment to participate in exchanges that go beyond artistic discourses, with citizens, various communities, and other sectors (such as healthcare or creative economy), Artistic Connective Practices explores non-hierarchical, emergent forms of inclusive and diverse collaboration. The professorship works in various contexts. This article focuses on one of these contexts, which took place in Tilburg West in collaboration with the community centre Wij West.¹

From 2021 to 2024, a series of week-long-residencies took place at Wij West aiming to experiment with the way the arts could contribute to the connection of residents of the area to themselves, others, and their neighbourhood. In the framework of these residencies, alumni of FAA and other art professionals were invited to explore the area around the centre, to meet, discuss, and work with its residents. As the coordinator of the project, being in dialogue with the invited artists before, during, and after their residencies, and also as one of the invited artist-researchers who conducted one of the residencies, I would like to critically reflect on what we learned from Wij West as a research group. The reflection culminates in six points of interest for the ways art institutions and researchers can collaborate with agents from civil society, other cultural institutions, and citizens in general. Hopefully, the act of looking back at the project in a reflective and critical way can be of use beyond the context of the specific collaboration, for example to artist-researchers working in similar ways in national and international contexts.

The Luchthavenbuurt and Wij West community centre

Wij West community centre is located in the area of Het Zand, more specifically in the Luchthavenbuurt (the ‘airport district’), in the western part of Tilburg. The area is characterized by extreme diversity in terms of cultural and social backgrounds. Moroccan, Syrian, French, Turkish, Surinamese, Dutch, Spanish, Romanian, Polish, and Indian were some of the languages that people there mentioned as their native language in the conversations we had with them. According to Esther Elias, a social worker active in the area, the numerous social houses that are placed in the neighbourhood are occupied by immigrants, refugees, people with mental difficulties, elderly people, single-parent families, and families with financially disadvantaged backgrounds. As Elias mentions, communication between social workers and residents of the area takes place almost exclusively through door-to-door visits and on a one-on-one level. Bringing people together, creating autonomous communities and sustainable participatory networks is significantly harder.² The day-to-day financial and other hardships people face, as well as the segregation between the different communities of the area, which often organize themselves separately from the other groups, were mentioned by residents as some of the reasons for this difficulty.³ This context renders the specific area challenging, and hence relevant for our research on artistic connective practices, in terms of looking for ways to establish sustainable social liaisons among its residents.

Wij West is run by Lois de Jong and Jesse de Doelder, who are responsible for coordinating the centre’s activities, which are developed together with the neighbourhood. As they explain, their vision is primarily to support the area’s residents by responding to their day-to-day needs, which may vary from finding a job, to learning the Dutch language as a newcomer, dealing with tax issues, or being in need of childcare. In some cases, Wij West also offers a temporary space in the building to some residents in order to realize their business plan in the form of a pop-up store (including computer and bike repair shops, a hair salon, a sewing workshop, and an exchange shop).

Alongside this aim, according to its directors, Wij West is also committed to facilitating participation by offering its space to residents to organize their autonomous events (such as sports, dance, and music classes) at weekends or evenings. Creating frameworks for community building – such as communal cooking, gardening, cleaning of the neighbourhood, and knowledge exchange (internet and computer skills, for example) – is also a main aim, together with curating projects of cultural exchange and fusion (such as, for example, a Ramadan market on King’s Day), which require people to go outside their comfort zone while respecting each culture’s ‘red lines’. A small communal cooking and restaurant space is operating more permanently, occasionally providing breakfast to the pupils of the primary school next door. Most of these activities are carried out by residents themselves working on a voluntary basis. In this way, the centre creates shared memories and experiences among residents aiming at what de Jong and de Doelder call “public familiarity”.⁴

From public familiarity to “publicing”

The directors of Wij West describe public familiarity as a certain type of sociability characterized by a familiar sense of belonging (in Wij West and its neighbourhood). Our aim as artist-researchers was to look for ways to expand and complexify this familiarity through a series of practices that could construct ‘another’ (opposite to the individualistic, segregated, alienated space and time that capitalism imposes) public space and time. In other words, the aim was to attempt to expand public familiarity into acts that I have elsewhere discussed as acts of “publicing” through artistic processes.⁵ What does it mean to create ‘public space’ and, moreover, ‘public time’ through art, though? What kind of relation between art and politics could assist the emergence of such space and time within the current neoliberal conditions of Western societies?

The challenge faced was to manage to craft communities beyond assumptions and stereotypes.

Performance theorist Bojana Kunst has posited that despite the almost obsessive focus of art, especially during the last decades, on politics and social problems, its work often remains pseudo-active because the ‘social’ (realm) itself is disappearing in a time of radical powerlessness in terms of establishing together the kind of realities in which people’s communities can be articulated.⁶ Art historian Claire Bishop elaborates further on problematic understandings of the ‘political’ in art.⁷ It is often the case, she argues, that artists wish to create socially and politically transforming processes, usually through vivid participation and interactivity, able to liberate us from our struggles. We therefore often witness artworks that wish to take over the work of governments and deal with social problems in their place. This, of course, is exactly what neoliberal governments also argue for when they demand that art have measurable, quantifiable effects on a social level. What is asked from artists is to deal with significant social issues that politicians are not themselves dealing with (despite this being their job) while the politicians focus on market-led economies. According to Bishop, artistic practices aiming at social impacts with ‘transformative’ effects denote a lack of faith in the power of art and in the work of artists, which is not to solve social problems but to enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and relations anew, work which calls for speculating about alternatives and not merely reproducing what already exists.

Τwo reasons are discussed here for the difficulty the arts faces in addressing the public in ways that open space for reimagining our social coexistence anew. One of them is the broader loss of the common world in contexts that push to their limits atomisation, fragmentation, and the specification of concerns and interests. The second reason relates to art’s normative (instead of imaginative) approach to social contexts in which it aims to intervene or, more ambitiously, solve ‘real’ problems. In sociopolitical contexts wherein the live gathering of people in public is becoming irrelevant, wherein the ‘public’ itself is continuously shrinking, wherein citizenry is paralysed, performance must not simply address people with what they already know, but contribute to the reinvention of a people by marking a space that invites the public to engage in another way of thinking and acting.⁸

The notion and practice of publicing was introduced in an attempt to articulate a proposal for this crucial shift. Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” placed human relations and their social context in the middle of art’s field of interest by giving emphasis to the aesthetic qualities of an interaction with the audience in concrete moments, preselected by the artists, very often without them previously informing – let alone asking for the consent of – the audience.⁹ Almost ten years later, in a remarkable “social turn”, art moved from interaction towards participatory processes that extend beyond aesthetics to cooperative modes of work and active engagement of the audience with certain social issues.¹⁰ Bishop has criticized the ways such works land out of nowhere for a certain (often short) period of time in an area or community with the ambition to intervene in important social processes through practices that are left incomplete.¹¹ Against this background, what I propose as publicing suggests an active use of ‘public’ as a verb, and an ongoing process of creating this public (indicated by the ‘-ing’ ending). The term relates to artistic actions that do not aim to refer to normative social functions or solve ‘real’ problems, but to challenge established norms in a community by opening space for the emergence of alternative, more imaginative, social configurations. In this sense, publicing proposes an ongoing process, always in progress, always negotiable among the different agents involved in it, of coproducing visible forms of another public space through art. And it acts both as a theoretical concept and as a practice that expands the line of relational aesthetics of the 1990s and of the social turn of the 2000s into the third decade of the twenty-first century in a way that might respond more meaningfully to current sociopolitical needs.

Philosopher and sociologist Cornelius Castoriadis has discussed publicness via “public time”, offering an invaluable standpoint towards understanding the connection between art and politics that publicing attempts to articulate. Time is, for Castoriadis, primarily a social issue, given that it is something we learn with and through others, society, and family. It is within time’s spatialized temporality that we construct our distinct individual subjectivities in our relation to the official social time of the calendar, and in our understanding and positioning towards society’s present, historical past, and future. Once the close interconnection between individual and social time, and between the latter and subjectivity, is established, it becomes clear how time can relate also to the changes that may occur to subjectivity, and thus to ‘otherness’ and the emergence of new forms of reality. When time is seen as the manifestation of human actions that create social imaginaries, then time may be seen also as that which can shift such significations in a direction different from the dominant one in a society. Following such ideas, publicing proposes that a new understanding of the ‘political’ in art would suggest other ways of spending time together; ways that interrupt established norms opening space for the emergence of alternative social configurations. This might mean time much more ‘wasted’ in the neoliberal sense, a time more slow, more present, and maybe less ‘rational’. One such time might be able to produce appearances of publicness that are created at the moment they appear, giving form and visibility to the possibility of becoming others and living together differently. Such an experience of time would indeed become the time of publicing.

The effort to construct such spatial and temporal qualities was met with more challenges and frustration than feelings of easiness and satisfaction, as is probably often the case when working in similar modes. From the start, the residencies that took place in Wij West were faced with a series of difficulties and concerns. The previously mentioned lack of spaces where people gather in the area, and the difficulty of reaching out to them and inviting them to invest time in participatory artistic process, were two of them. Another great challenge was the way artistic activities could be designed so that they are on the one hand warm and welcoming, while on the other hand not merely fun, superficial interventions or top-down didactic experiences but also a frame for safe encounters where the difficult questions (usually hidden under the carpet especially in similarly diverse areas) could also appear. The way we could build on existing local actions, processes and needs, instead of proposing something entirely new from the outside, was a third challenge.

Proposing a metaphorical, more poetic approach towards ourselves, others, and the world based on the body and its senses, with the aim to surprise our own selves (as artist-researchers and as audiences/participants) and shift subjectivities, could be seen as the main contribution of art in the effort for social change.

Similarly, we quickly noticed that the staff members of Wij West – as is probably expected in institutional contexts – use a certain vocabulary to refer to or discuss the communities around them. As this vocabulary shapes and later establishes itself via its regular use, it establishes also certain assumptions or stereotypes about these communities. The challenge faced was to manage to craft communities beyond these (or other) assumptions and stereotypes. This also required special attention to the way we positioned ourselves or talked about these communities from the outside. Through these, and several other, questions and concerns, the various artistic proposals of the project started to timidly build social encounters on a micro-scale (for groups of five to twenty people) where less expected conversations (compared to those that cultural workers or other administrators working in the centre, for example, usually had with people) took place pointing to more imaginative, playful, artistically inspired ways.

The proposals included:¹² Visual artist Kamila Wolszczak (kamilawolszczak.com) invited participants to walk in the streets of Het Zand, collect found materials (soil, broken artefacts), and create artworks with them while sharing personal stories. Hannah Rogerson and Pieter Visser (teatime-company.com) focused on the notion of ‘home’, addressing both adults and children. Together with theatre maker and researcher Gerrie Fiers from FAA (www.linkedin.com/in/gerrie-fiers-b474907), I conducted a residency on the practice of public speaking. Sounds Like West was a residency focusing on collective music making, designed and facilitated by musician Maite van der Marel (www.collectingbeats.com). Juggling with Nature with circus artist Valentina Solari (www.valentina-circus.com) invited primary school students to experiment with playful juggling inspired by the plants of Wij West’s garden. Hungarian artist Orsolya Nemeth turned her status as a foreigner into a role-play game and invited participants to sit together around a large map of the area and introduce her to it in performative, imaginative ways.

What follows looks back, in a reflective and critical way, to what happened during those residencies and the talks we had with the artists after their completion, in order to detect (through the difficulties and the potential of that social experimentation) some concrete points of interest that might be of use also for other artist-researchers and cultural workers working in similar ways.

Learning from Wij West – or how to move between artistic research, cultural institutions and community building

Going back to the archive of notes and artistic reports that followed the project’s residencies and analyzing the questions, concerns and processes involved in them, I arrived at an articulation of the six points of interests below that propose – through the limitations of our work in Wij West but also through the insights that emerged from it – some necessary shifts, in terms of institutional organization, policy changes and artistic approach, that could assist future collaboration among artist-researchers, cultural workers and citizens.

1. Infrastructural and mental shifts

The (physical and mental) space that our collaboration could occupy in the overall work done in Wij West has been central and ongoing in our discussions. Such collaborations normally need at least one person from each organization involved in the project taking responsibility for it on almost a full-time basis to act as the constant liaison between the different partners. Although from the moment this became clear in our collaboration, things developed considerably, mutual infrastructural shortage was a constant limitation of the work we wanted to do in Wij West. The centre employs, on a part-time basis, only two members of staff – its directors, who act as curators, facilitators, and administrators. The presence of an expert such as a social worker, who could act as a mediator creating sustainable connections with the neighbourhood, was missing for most of the residencies. FAA worked on acquiring additional funding in order for its staff members to be able to have a more solid presence in Wij West. Additionally, as the project’s production needs were expanding, an extra person was needed to take care of logistics, purchase of art materials, and other production and technical requests such as communication and promotion of the open calls etc.

Working for several years in the public sphere as artists and researchers, and collaborating with various organizations on participation and community building, infrastructural inflexibility has probably been the largest limitation our work faced. Interestingly enough, though, even when the financial and production resources were there, as well as willingness and true interest from the side of the agents involved to commit to such work, the shifts from the dominant principle of quantification (attracting larger audiences) to the micro-scale of artistic connectivity; from production-oriented working modes and marketing communication strategies (that capitalism imposes) to process-oriented activities, have proved hard for art and other organizations of social interest. Apart from the infrastructural, then, the main shift that connectivity requires (and which connects closely to infrastructural shifts) seems to be a mental shift that values a slower pace, patience, emotional labour, and deep listening. Such a shift starts from a radically different understanding of the words ‘value’ and ‘invest’.

Working towards social connectivity requires, from the start, particular infrastructural shifts from all agents involved in such work. Investing space and time dedicated to this aim, and providing staff members focusing mainly on this work, are prerequisites for connectivity to start emerging. The rhythm of such endeavour may differ significantly from the production rhythm of other types of (art)works or from the exhausting rhythm that financial austerity and precarity impose on institutions and their staff members. It differs also from the hectic rhythms of the capitalist imperative for constant visibility, productivity, and effectiveness. Trying to bring people together is a slow process. It may be the case (it usually is) that from the outside it seems as if nothing is moving for a long time. Connections need trust and trust is built step by step. In institutions that struggle to exist with limited resources and low-paid employees, it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to even start experimenting with connective practices that would challenge established social and power relations. It thus became obvious that in order for artistic (or any type of) social connectivity to emerge, a significant shift in the way cultural institutions are funded and organized structurally should come first.

2. Building vocabularies

Another continuous challenge in our collaboration with Wij West has been the lack of communication that often emerged from the use of different languages. This was not only due to the literal difference between Dutch, English, or the various other mother tongues of participants involved in the residencies, but mainly a difference in the vocabulary used or the different meanings given to the same words. On the one side, was the language and terminology of artistic and research discourses; on the other, the facilitation and production language of Wij West or the everyday language used with and by its volunteers (mostly non-native Dutch speakers). Along with these languages and their distinct operational modes, come the assumptions that accompany them: what is art, what constitutes an artwork (versus an entertaining creative activity, for example), and what could be an ‘artistic’ mode of connectivity for Wij West, FAA, and the participants of the residencies? Is the language of artistic discourses the proper one to use when addressing people who are not art professionals and have little access to art and culture in general? Or is it an exclusive language that should adjust itself to them regardless of its aims and needs? What other languages are there to communicate with besides the verbal ones? How can the value of open process-based artistic proposals be recognized as equal to the demand for ‘clear concepts’ and deliverable ‘final products’? These questions had different replies from the different agents involved in the project in Wij West and revealed the demanding labour required in order to create a common vocabulary among diverse organizations and social groups with different goals and visions. The value of similar projects lies exactly in the effort all involved agents contribute in advance for the construction of a common language that should be seen as the ground of their collaboration.

3. Careful addressing of participants

Performance artist Janez Janša has argued that the first question that art asks is “how to address the audience?”¹³ How to stand next to or opposite those who receive your work as an artist? How much should your proposal respond to the audience’s needs and wishes or how far should it push them beyond their limits, towards unfamiliar practices? What is the difference between bringing people together for or facilitating a certain activity, and building a community based on horizontal participation? Similar questions were placed at the centre of the residencies in Wij West and the discussions we held with its directors.

From early on, it became clear that the distance between us (as artist-researchers) and the residents of the area would have to be covered with larger and more decisive steps from our side, so that the other side would start walking slowly towards ours. We learned that we would have to go to them rather than expect them to come to us. We therefore looked for already existing social activities in the area and joined them. Starting from processes that people would easily recognize and feel familiar with, and shifting to more unexpected directions, proved helpful when addressing the residents. We learned that one needs first to feel safe in order to gradually accept the challenge of discovering new perspectives for one’s everyday reality. Flexibility was another skill that we had to cultivate when addressing the residents of the area. Inviting participation from people who struggle daily and are not familiar with arts, meant acting on a short notice (project participants could not commit to a proposal much in advance due to precarious living conditions), adapting on the spot to participants’ time-schedules and languages, being ready to quickly change working plans by adjusting to space shortages or weather changes. When needed, it meant also redesigning the work based on participants’ needs and interests.

Balancing on such sensitive edges was what allowed us to experience the rare but still invaluable moments when people stayed longer than their initial commitment, were coming back more often than agreed in order to contribute further to the work, or were inviting more people from their social circle to join. Artistic connectivity emerges, we would learn, when one stays close to participants, listens to their needs and communicates openly with them, and becomes a recognizable and trustful figure. It emerges when there is a safe environment for exchanging thoughts. An environment where the artist – as the facilitator of the process – gradually steps aside, making space for self-organization and co-authorship.

We would also learn the importance of things that may seem simple to do but are often missing. Starting a working session with a relaxed time for tea or coffee, time to meet each other and connect on an informal basis is crucial, for example. Looking for what was there before us (a poem, an image, another activity based on people’s stories) and building from this previous work and interest of participants offers a continuation that proves very useful for artistic connectivity to emerge. Staying connected after the end of the work also contributes significantly to the empowerment of the community, cultivating its potential to take action independently from the presence of the artist. In general, the more attentively all temporalities involved in our public engagement as artists (the before, the time of our work, its afterlife) are designed, the stronger connectivity becomes. And then, as if by a miracle, everything flows: people commit, logistics work out, artists are inspired, the work is impactful.

4. Metaphors we live by

If we indeed “live by metaphors”, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have suggested, and we interact with the world through (metaphorical) concepts, then our work as artists and researchers is to shift the dominant xenophobic, individualist concepts we currently live by, towards more egalitarian, inclusive ones.¹⁴ The artistic proposals that took place in Wij West looked for ways to do that. For an example, I would like to refer to the work of visual artist Kamila Wolszczak who approached the area Het Zand (‘the sand’, in English) literally as an actual sand field and invited people to experiment with it materially, giving new forms to the neighbourhood they live in, which they were asked to see as local earth, the material ground we are based on (literally as physical bodies but also metaphorically and mentally).

Similarly, during my residency in Wij West the idea for a bigger future project emerged based on the neighbourhood’s name Luchthavenbuurt . Many streets there are named after airports, in a neighbourhood occupied largely by displaced people who had to travel often under extremely hard conditions. What if we were to take this name metaphorically and work with the metaphor to tackle the difficult questions or experiences it brings with it? If the neighbourhood is indeed an airport, what countries appear on its arrival and departure boards? Where are its gates and where do they take you? What documents does one need to show there in order to board? Airports have strict security protocols too. What would a similar protocol be in Luchthavenbuurt? What should someone know, do, or avoid doing, in order to navigate safely in the area?

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has talked about the difference between learning processes that “pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit-making” and what she calls “narrative imagination”, which involves a daring mind and empathetic understanding of human experiences and the complexity of the world we live in. In Wij West, we would learn that the empathetic critical thought that we lose in our education as citizens today, could be reinforced via artistic processes and the metaphorical worlds they construct.¹⁵

5. Embodying connections

Nussbaum’s narrative imagination relates also to the fifth point of interest. In neoliberal contexts where the dominant social imaginary of individualist pseudo-rationality obscures any other element of social interaction, art is able to place the body, its senses and affects, once again at the centre of our social coexistence. Political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have stressed the significant role of bodily affects in politics.¹⁶ The people, Mouffe suggests, cannot be wholly locked in a rationalist framework, unable to grasp the embodied affective dimension of politics. In order to resonate with the problems encountered in their daily lives, they need to start from where they are and how they feel. This is why artistic practices (practices that work on and with affects) can play an important role in society today.

Aligning with such thoughts, our invited artists experimented in different ways with the embodied dimension of politics. Wolszczak placed tactility (“the matters at hand” as she accurately described it)¹⁷ in the centre of her work by asking participants to touch and be touched by the materiality of their area. Circus artist Valentina Solari brought the human and non-human participants of her work (school students and plants from the garden of Wij West) into physical contact, asking them to learn from each other’s body, rhythm, pace. Artist-educator Orsolya Nemeth connected people by gathering their bodies around two large objects: a table and the map of their neighbourhood. Materializing space in such ways motivated people to think in much more embodied ways about where they are, how they move there, what Tilburg West is for them, etc. The challenging scale and perspective of the materials used in such experimentation managed to create other relations among participants and the other human and non-human bodies around them.

In the feedback session of one of the activities in Wij West, one of the participants described quite affectively the embodied dimension of politics that art can cultivate. As she wrote:

Today, I stood on a stage and told my story... It was a stage of only 40cm high and a surface area of 1 x 1 metres, but still... [In the past] I often held myself back because I worried about ‘what would others think if I say this?’ However, I can increasingly let this go… In the future, I will continue to stand up and practice expressing myself in or in front of a group. I will take my sweaty armpits for granted for a while, because I really feel like I can do this more.¹⁸

Taking those “sweaty armpits for granted for a while” and daring to challenge yourself physically outside your comfort zone in order to meet others and connect more deeply with them, is exactly what allows connectivity to emerge. And it is the playful, imaginative space that art creates that gives the power to people to do that, go beyond their limits, think and speak differently. From there on, other imaginaries may pop up… And this brings us to the last point of interest.

6. Becoming others

Art historian and critic Jeroen Boomgaard posits that arts often facilitate practices where spectators “feel at home in a context that adapts itself to them” rather than challenging expectations and questioning existing power relations.¹⁹ Art, though, according to Boomgaard, should bring us in contact with the unexpected, the contradictory, and the unknown, in order to reactivate a truly public space, understood as constant encounter and negotiation. It should cultivate the openness for approaching the different, the ‘other’. Instead of simply recognizing ourselves and the world in an artwork, we should discover possible new views of us and others.²⁰ Disidentification and becoming different should then be the main aim of art. Only then can it support the conditions for emancipation, Boomgaard concludes. Already in 2009, philosopher Jacques Rancière discussed civic emancipation in a similar way, as the struggle to connect spaces, gestures, and words in ways that differ from those imposed by neoliberalism.²¹ Instead of identifying with an artwork, we should become different subjects from the ones we were before encountering it. This is the greatest challenge we face today as artists. How to not only, as performance scholars Bojana Cvejic and Ana Vujanovic have noted, “cynically recognize a disagreeable state of affairs without engaging with a critical and constructive stance from which to change it”, but also to make the effort to imagine other possible worlds that could take the place of those disagreeable states of affairs, where we partake in new social relations as other subjects.²² Getting out of your comfort zone as an artist and taking people out of theirs is definitely a hard task. But that’s exactly when connection emerges.

The artists who worked in Wij West experimented with proposals that confronted themselves with this challenge. The attempt was not always successful, but the small shifts that were reported in some cases were invaluable for our research. Solari found herself unexpectedly surprised by students’ amazement about the fact that some plants in the garden of Wij West could be eaten. She describes how she could see the children’s universe expand a bit through this new relation to their food sources. This attached them much more to the plants they chose to work with. Later they were even protesting loudly when the juggling tricks devised didn’t suit the characteristics of their plants. Similarly, Nemeth asked people to make a wish for someone they may have seen in the neighbourhood but do not know personally. A small but not easy act – to actually try to enter into someone else’s shoes, to imagine what they go through and what they might need – may seem simpler than what it proved to be for participants who insisted on making a wish about their family and friends instead.

Moving forward

These six points of interest, hopefully, can be of use for similar collaborations taking place in contexts where capitalist urbanization and intense waves of privatization, spatial control, policing and surveillance progressively destroy the city as a social, political, and livable commons.²³ The need to pay more attention to the different temporalities involved in the demanding process of connecting people, and the distinct demands that each such attempt creates, was something that our work in Wij West made clear. The time prior to the start of the artistic work needs to focus on the necessary infrastructural and organizational shifts that the collaboration needs (which may differ significantly from one collaboration to the next, but in all cases should be carefully thought through and implemented in advance), as well as on the construction of a common vocabulary (which also relates closely to the context of the specific collaboration and cannot be superficially transferred from one to the next). Deciding clearly on the way audiences/participants will be addressed definitely characterizes significantly the first steps of an artist’s presence in an area.

This addressing should develop and shift continuously for the whole duration of the project, depending on the relations that emerge and their needs. More importantly, though, it should also expand after the end of the project in order to sustain the community that has emerged from it. Interestingly enough, sometimes (artistic) connectivity emerges after the (artistic) work has ended. Not so much ‘because’ of it – in the sense that it is not attached to the artist or the work in a linear relationship of cause and effect – but ‘from’ it, in the sense that it springs from the work, which provided the initial context, but may develop in unexpected directions that multiply the agency of participants (including artists themselves who do not, and should not, control this connectivity).

In all cases, proposing a metaphorical, more poetic approach towards ourselves, others, and the world based on the body and its senses, with the aim to surprise our own selves (as artist-researchers and as audiences/participants) and shift subjectivities, could be seen as the main contribution of art in the effort for social change. Although this change may seem almost an impossible task in current neoliberal conditions of working and living, even the effort to create a space that values all bodies, stories, experiences present in it, building a common ground that empowers and emancipates ourselves within and beyond arts, is definitely something worth trying for (even if we often fail) again and again.

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Danae Theodoridou

is a performance maker and researcher. Her work focuses on the relation between art and democracy. She teaches in Fontys Academy of the Arts and conducts research in Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. She is the author of Publicing: Practising Democracy Through Performance (Nissos, 2022).

www.danaetheodoridou.com

Footnotes