Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the epistemological, methodological and ethical problems that emerged designing a participatory action-research on the ‘artivist’ (artistic + activist) performative practices that address the idea of the European Union at the time of the crisis.

Paper long abstract:

The economic and social crisis arising from the financial collapse of 2008 has had a deep impact on the European Union, not only in a strictly economic, political and social sense, but also on its perception as a transnational entity based on a complex and recently-born imagined community. In 2013 a little group of Italian activists that were residing in different European countries (including the author), began a transmedia non-academic project entitled Ginger/Europe is an archipelago: a journey through European waterways in times of crisis. The aim was to collaboratively document, through audio-visual and virtual tools, the performative 'artivist' reactions to the crisis and the sudden awake from the 'European Dream' that the crisis provoked. In 2015, a more articulated version of this project has been approved by the Portuguese Institute for Ethnomusicology and the fieldwork will begin in late 2016. The new project include a strong academic engagement that didn't existed in the original one, but the institutional support also allowed to further develop the participatory/collaborative mechanisms. This paper will briefly resume the evolution of the original non-academic project into the current one, focusing on the ethical, epistemological and methodological problems that the process uncovered and the solutions that have been proposed.