Journal of Arts & Communities - Spaces of Reconnection, Jun 2023

One problem that plagues an ageing society like Singapore is the generation gap. Such a gap could be precipitated by misconceptions and ageism arising from reduced intergenerational contact. This article explores the use of arts-based interventions to encourage intergenerational interactions. Through the blending of design and art therapy principles, the authors propose a novel design framework for intergenerational practice. Based on the proposed framework, a series of design interventions (i.e. Ageless Dreams, Memory Catcher and Rippling Conversations) was developed. These interactive prototypes were designed to facilitate the sharing of narratives and memories among intergenerational audiences through interactive play and collaborative artmaking. Case studies with families and art therapy groups were conducted to explore the potentialities of the framework and prototypes. The co-creation processes resulted in an array of unique artefacts of expression (structures, drawings and marble art prints), each embodying different meanings and stories. Documented findings suggest that the activities facilitated positive emotions, meaning-making and inclusivity. The process of collaborative artmaking allowed the groups to create a shared language of their own, establishing an effective line of communication to foster greater intergenerational understanding.

The article explores the curatorial strategies involved in the completion of an interdisciplinary conference. Considering factors of control, space, opportunity and most importantly generating a safe space to experiment and participate in an academic conference to those generally seen as outside the academy. With this in mind the work explores the ways in which the event became a testing ground and developmental jumping off point to identify the ways in which support can be offered to a widened participant pool.

This article examines the visibility of communities of demonstration and protest in live happening and in digital reproduction – how a protesting community becomes seen, individuals unseen and how theatrical elements are employed and deployed to enhance and augment such visibility as a scene. Looking at protests by Extinction Rebellion (XR), I observe how heightened performance/theatricality saturates their demonstrations and spawns heightened visibility. This hyper-articulates their messages as optically charged, ready for representation in photography, video and audio that can echo through media channels. Instigated with an intention for a technologically reproduced and mediatized after-event – a digital afterlife. In this sense, theatricalizing the demonstration event as performance scene makes it, and any associated messages, ready to transcend event time–space and become a demonstration hyper-object, following Timothy Morton. That is, through theatrical performance their message/statement/community becomes part of a massive entity that exists beyond local scales of space and time. As accessible, temporally extensive data such communities and messages exist far beyond the live protest. While not an object per se, XR’s messages and their affective impact contaminate and spread by being commented on, seen, retweeted, hash-tagged, forwarded, printed and so on in print and digital media spaces. In so doing, they reach far greater audiences than those at the demonstration event, amplifying their virtual spaces with the community’s application of theatricality working both as a catalyst and carrier.

As in-person social interaction became widely known as the primary mode of transmission of the COVID-19 virus, alternative modes of social interaction were adopted to maintain interpersonal communication during the various lockdowns that were to come. By analysing the application of five key concepts (Goffman’s definition of the situation, Anderson’s imagined communities, Fischer-Licht’s autopoietic feedback loop, Murray’s procedural authorship and Agamben’s state of exception), we develop an assemblage for assessing Innersloth’s Among Us as a proxy for the pandemic experience.

This article discusses the photographic project, ‘More Lonely Ere’, made during the COVID-19 pandemic focusing on the community of Watford, Hertfordshire, where the author was based and unable to leave. Watford will be compared to Marion Shoard’s ‘edgelands’ and the concept of rurality will be used to situate Watford as a liminal space between city and countryside but also to demonstrate the limited locality and community during COVID-19. The article also considers Roland Barthes’ ‘Idiorrhythm’ describing how people share spaces but live according to individual daily rhythms. This connects ideas of community during a pandemic when people are expected to maintain separation from each other. The resulting photographs will be analysed in terms of a conscious ‘documentary aesthetic’ and photographic nostalgia, materiality and abstraction will be discussed. Comparisons are made to canonical works and also Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ poem to provide useful metaphor and a framework for photographic work.

In this article, I discuss how the logic of Shipibo ancestral healing or Onanyabo, is internal to Shipibo culture, and that such a logic is explicated in the creation and curation of Shipibo art across transnational boundaries. Moving from the term ‘network’ to ‘meshwork’, I explore how Shipibo Onanyabo operates across ontological difference, bringing together diverse mediums and perspectives. I consider how we might come to envisage the Shipibo community through the perspective of a meshwork, through recourse to the curation of Shipibo art in New York contemporary gallery spaces.

The advent of social networking today is bringing us closer to the people, places and things we love to see. As an avenue for bridging the communication gap and advancing human interaction, social media’s pervasiveness has had tremendous impact on Ghanaian dance culture in contemporary times. Popular dancers today present their oeuvres in the form of short videos (mostly a minute) on Instagram and solicit user responses from audience of diverse backgrounds and locations. Considering this influence of globalization, its pervasive global communication media, and the move from in-person to virtual communication, it is imperative to interrogate the utilization of the social media networks (especially Instagram) by Ghanaian popular dancers in recent times as regards its impact on the proliferation of the locally created popular dances. This article is framed within the concept of Active and Affective modes of engaging with mediated dances and Connective Marginalities in addition to perspectives from globalization, social media and popular dance studies. Through the analysis of the exploits of two famous popular dancers in Ghana and specific ‘cypher pages’, I highlight the opportunities offered by Instagram as an alternative ‘cultural space’ for the marginalized youth to exhibit their creative ingenuities whilst interacting and reaching out to a wider audience within the shared mediated space.