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.