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- Volume 3, Issue 2, 2011
Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2011
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2011
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The living rooms our city-centres ought to be: Olohuone an urban experiment in Helsinki Railway Station
More LessABSTRACTOlohuone is the Finnish word for living room, as well as the name I gave a publicly accessible installation that I made on the basis of art and action research. I will briefly describe the context of the installation, and then proceed to analyse it as an urban intervention,and finally offer the findings produced by the entire process. Keith Hoggart and colleagues write that ‘Action Research is associated with learning about society through efforts to change it’. Olohuone was part of my action research and a fundamental component of my doctoral dissertation. In it, I framed a situation at a busy urban space and, in so doing, I intervened and temporarily changed the field of my study. Olohuone proved to be a critical case study for my research, mainly because of the responses of the people who interacted with it. In these years since Olohuone, I have lectured about it on numerous occasions. When I talk about Olohuone, the reactions I get encourage me to keep on using it as an example of place-making and of research in urban studies. During lectures, I discover aspects of Olohuone that I have not thought of before, often due to the questions posed by students. This is why I think that my findings from Olohuone merit consideration in relation to action in art and design research, place-making and intercultural dialogue.
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Interactive art in the suburbs: Art projects that increase involvement from the community
Authors: Kicki Hendahl, Giovanna Aguirre and Evis MagnussonABSTRACTIn this article we examine how interactive art can be integrated into city planning. A pleasant, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment, inspired by residents’ needs and desires, has been our objective. During the last seven years, the city of Örebro has cooperated with us, three artists, to develop community-based projects aimed at raising levels of involvement amongst residents. Residents have participated in creative workshops together with the artists in order to realize a better living environment for all concerned. We have worked in close cooperation with local authorities, businesses and associations. We have applied involvement culture to suburban settings, producing both temporary artworks and more permanent changes to peoples’ quality of life. Our findings constitute a growing source of knowledge to be used to foster democratic city planning well anchored in the community. Many of the residents who became involved in the art projects, that we carried out on behalf of the municipality of Örebro, had never been given the chance to influence city planning or the creation of an artwork. We were able to create spaces and places that were not only public in name but also in content.
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‘This is my home country or something in-between’ – Finnish-Somali youth sharing their experiences through performative narratives
More LessABSTRACTIn this article I will focus on a workshop run with a group of youth mostly from Somali backgrounds. The workshops were run in cooperation with Youth’s Multicultural Living Room and Youth Department of the City of Helsinki. The workshops are part of my larger research project ‘A Finn, a Foreigner or a Transnational Hip-hopper?’. The study was conducted within the framework of participatory research, and examines the identification negotiations of second-generation Finnish immigrant youth. In the research I apply ethnographic methods, in particular, those of participatory and performative design, which I will briefly discuss here. In the workshops at hand it was noted that the participating youth placed themselves on borders and liminal spaces,especially because of the racism and prejudices they frequently encounter. Therefore, this article will concentrate on the topics of belongings, Finnishness and transnational identifications as represented in the words and visual narratives of the participants. I give space here to their own words and images they have produced.Finally, I will outline the kinds of horizons the observed ambivalence can create.
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Creative research approaches
More LessABSTRACTThe article explores the possibility of developing and using creative research approaches and methods in social work research. The article starts by introducing the opposing positions in the on-going science wars between evidence-based and non-evidence-based approaches. It argues that if research is to understand and capture the complexity of social problems and social work, more effort must be devoted to developing qualitative studies – especially at a time when evidence-based approaches hold such a strong position. Research also needs to focus much more on creative tools. The article suggests Forum Theatre as a good participatory method as it allows a more power-sharing and open dialogue between researchers and informants, and it presents an example of Forum Theatre used in a research process. The article ends with a comparison of creative social work research approaches to what has been characterized as the science of the concrete: a context-dependent science, oriented more towards subjects than objects, and in which judgements and decisions are based on values.
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An abyss where darkness dwells
More LessABSTRACTThis article enquires into the nature of the communication between a dance artist and people living with memory loss, brain damage and behavioural disorders. Art in this context means that something happens in the nursing community; its range travels from performances to dancing or gardening together. The core of the writing lies in the happenings that are discussed in the phenomenological and autoethnographic field. The article illuminates how something happens between a dance artist and the residents, something that happens in art, and through art, that can be described as an abyss where darkness dwells, a no-man’s-land where nobody knows anything better than another. The happenings are discussed with texts by Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas. The collision of the art happenings in the community also reveals some attitudes and habits of the nursing staff.
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Golden Merganser Story Promenade: A case study of oral multilingual storytelling strategies
More LessABSTRACTThis case study illustrates how multilingual storytelling strategies were investigated in the context of ‘Golden Merganser: Story Promenade’ on 1 October 2011 in the City of Turku. Experiments in oral multilingual storytelling represent an intercultural practice. The artistic work was informed by Guattari’s critical theory of three ecological registers. The storytellers investigated multilingual storytelling strategies through artistic work. The outcome of the project suggests that the essence of telling a narrative is to experience the world of the narrative. The multilingual storytellers need to establish the same world, dream the same dream, make dramaturgical work, and engage in music improvisation with different languages. Multilingual storytelling practice helps to encounter foreign languages with curiosity and interest and offer possibilities for strengthening multilingual identity construction.
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Why drawing, now?
Authors: Anne Douglas, Amanda Ravetz, Kate Genever and Johan Siebers
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