Animating Transformation creates a framework to document and test the impact of change-oriented artistic research. It comprises five long-term projects that work towards positive recognition of more-than-human beings and dimensions. All five explore relationality by turning attention to sensorial and speculative experiences, proposing a shift of cultural orders and hierarchies. The resulting artistic works do not follow the logic of education or persuasion, but one that the IfCAR-project team hypothetically calls animating transformation. By documenting and collecting diverse audience experiences in different social spaces, the team creates empirical references to discuss and further conceptualize this contingent and open-ended approach to transformation.
While artistic researchers have increasingly turned to the environmental challenges of current times, a satisfying empirical foundation to discuss what art can contribute to change has been missing. By proposing the notion of animation, the IfCAR-project seeks to build grounds to position artistic research within a larger field of change-oriented interventions and practices.
In the context of the climate crisis, research communities and activists have repeatedly emphasized that there is a “knowledge-action gap” in Western societies, pointing to the limited impact of evidence on the anthropogenic causes of climate change on how individuals and societies act. A transdisciplinary field of educational and activist practice has emerged that seeks to bridge this gap.
Drawing on the experience of conflict transformation, this project argues that the focus on evidence and rational thinking alone is not enough to bring about change. For sustainable change, the separative patterns underlying cultural action must also be transformed, which requires operating in relation to the symbolic and affective orders of postindustrial societies.
Instead of intervening, communicating facts, or mobilizing, the five artistic research projects of Animating Transformation draw attention to speculative forms of understanding and sensorial experiences, building affective connections with the more-than-human and the immaterial.
This project expects that such artistic explorations can contribute a complementary approach to cultural transformation and the transdisciplinary field of change-oriented practice. However, as they mostly circulate within specialized artistic circles, this potential has hardly been studied in a transdisciplinary context. This leads to an unsatisfying situation: The field of art is developing increasing sophistication in exploring (more-than-)human relationality without, however, being challenged from a transdisciplinary change-oriented perspective. The objective of Animtating Transformation is to create a framework that enables this discussion.
Procedure of the study:
Phase 1: Each artist creates a presentation of their work and invites a test audience comprising different social perspectives. The audience members are instructed to take pictures and write/record a narrative account of their experiences.
Phase 2: Each artist finds a social space or (informal) institution outside of the art field where the presentation of their work could be meaningful.
Based on a dialogical exchange with the people using/running the space, they develop an embedded presentation of their work. They document the dialogical process and the perceptions created on site.
Phase 3: Based on the interests of their works, each artist finds a partner who is professionally engaged in cultural transformation. Together with the partner, they develop a format to combine their approaches and collaborate. They implement the format in a specific context.
This project is positioned in relation to the challenges posed by the global climate crisis, and the field of practices that addresses these challenges. However, the project’s focus on overcoming separative patterns and on relating to what cannot be fully understood rationally is relevant beyond environmental concerns as well.
Postindustrial societies have been facing multiple destabilizations and (geopolitical) polarization. In view of this context, it is crucial to establish an understanding of artistic research that considers its social relevance and that considers the capacities of artistic research to contribute to cultural transformation and to the transdisciplinary field of change-oriented research and practice.
Thus, the understanding that this project elaborates is not only directed towards cultural transformation in relation to the knowledge-action gap. It also addresses artistic research in terms of a field which is being institutionalized at art universities in Switzerland and Europe, contributing an understanding of artistic research in terms of a socially engaged discipline that seeks to have an impact beyond the field of art.