Paper short abstract:

We engage with the different dynamics of collaborative practice that involved art and ethnography and unfolded in the context of the INSPIRE Open Space – a workshop/residency - key part of a research project. INSPIRE studies the role of artists and creative practice in and after violent conflict.

Paper long abstract:

In this dialogical performative presentation by two artists and an anthropologist, we engage with the different dynamics of collaborative practice that involved art and ethnography and unfolded in the context of the INSPIRE Open Space – a workshop/residency part of the INSPIRE research project (2020-2024). INSPIRE studies the role of artists and creative practice in and after violent conflict. Collaboration with artists is a key element of the project's methodological approach to explore and highlight the plurality of knowledges. Recognizing the situatedness of knowledges (Haraway 1988) and the embodied and partial nature of knowledge, through artistic collaborative methods we aimed to explore how artists, art and audiences engage with social injustice through personal creative practice. In September 2022, we co-organized an open space with artists who through their personal experiences and methodologies share their practices and created a hybrid, multilayered perspective on the issues related to exile, displacement and political conflict.

Open Space became a platform for intimate dialogue and a collaborative opening towards the other. By crossing art practice with ethnographic methods and reflecting on how different knowledges emerge in such collaborative spaces, we ask how different dynamics embedded in a variety of situated knowledges and positionalities as well as know-hows methodological tools that artists and researchers employ, shape and reshape experiences, perceptions and ideals of collaborative engagements. What type of knowledges emerge as a result? What are the potentials, tensions, conflicts and limits around narrations and knowledges of violence and displacement in such processes?