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Paper short abstract

Building on interdisciplinary research in the Horizon Europe project “Pacesetters”, this paper investigates co-creation in “Real World Labs” and their focus on “advanced practices”. We argue they constitute complex “collaborative sites of becoming” and generative processes of world-making.

Paper long abstract

Building on interdisciplinary research in the Horizon Europe project “Pacesetters: Powering artistic and cultural entrepreneurship to drive climate transition”, this paper investigates the project’s “Real-World Labs” (RWL) as generative processes of world-making. The paper interrogates especially the project’s co-creative, conceptually complex and transversal work on documenting and bringing-forth so-called “advanced practices” – ways art, culture and creativity (may) collaboratively drive socio-ecological transition. The RWL’s are three concrete and diverse urban and rural physical locations (Genalguacil in Andalucia, Spain, Nowa Huta in Krakow, Poland, and Galway in Ireland) at the margins of hegemonic discourses on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Pacesetters project have conceived the RWL’s as sites for highly interdisciplinary and intersectoral experimentation and co-creation with actors such as scientists, citizens, artists, cultural institutions and municipalities. The main aim of them is to spur social imagination, experimentation and testing of multiple approaches of co-creative research through arts and culture. Arts and culture, history and heritage, mediated through artistic, practice- and action-based research, are the lenses and processes through which generative encounters and unexpected processes, outcomes and results may emerge and be further enabled and strenghtened.

Utilizing theories co-design, co-creation and world-making (e.g. Escobar 2018, Handelman 2021), that highlight the complexities and “messieness” of emergence and the “forming of form”, the paper emphasises how the affective-aesthetic dimensions involved in uniting “feeling and form” (Langer 1953, Hardt 2014) is key to understanding these RWL’s as artistically and creatively powered “collaborative sites of becoming”.