Journey into Relatedness: ways to overcome the separation between inner and outer action, engender eco-social insight and facilitate new forms of transdisciplinary Connective Practice, Social Sculpture and Socially Engaged Art

Journey into Relatedness is a practice-based research investigating ways to redress the lack of attention given in Socially Engaged Art to the necessary interconnectedness and continuity between social engagement and individual mind-shift work. Mind-shift-work is a term now used in the expanded art field of Social Sculpture and Connective Practice. It was coined by Shelley Sacks, one of its key researcher-practitioners, to emphasise the ‘work’ involved in shifting one’s points of view, attitudes, and values. This reflective commentary presents and considers the explorations undertaken through my research journey, with the aim of developing a practice of relational engagement based on reciprocity and self-reflectivity and on relational methods enabling a kind of intersubjectivity in which both the inner individual-context of the participants and the shared social-context become sites of action. The practice-based exploration and reflective commentary deal with questions that have arisen as a practitioner of Socially Engaged Art and responses to these questions inspired and informed by Social Sculpture and Connective Practice methods and strategies. In contrast to the ethos of Socially Engaged Art, Social Sculpture and Connective Practice recognise the intimate relationship between social transformation and personal mind-shift work and the link between socially constructed assumptions and personal attitudes and mindsets. This view has been explored through my research process by re-engaging with the evolution and transition between two of my key works: Bait-al-Karama (2010) and You Are But You Are Not (2016). The research process does this by revisiting the reasons and sensibilities that motivated me to find new ways of practising that could broaden my work beyond the limitations of Socially Engaged Art’s emphasis on a problem-solving and context-specific approach. This commentary highlights the dangers inherent to this kind of approach when artistic interventions are understood primarily as functional and useful responses to the visible outer social-context, eclipsing the invisible individual inner-context. Having interrogated these questions through a research process, I go on to propose new relational engagement approaches – such as ‘reflective arenas’ and ‘terrain of concern’, as well as new methods and strategies – like ‘situating glossary’ and ‘image-word’ that integrate aesthetic processes with discursive modes. The new approach to ‘participatory practice’ in the research, and presented in this commentary, is designed to reduce the danger of reductionist I-Other relations prevalent in much participatory social art. In which the participant’s identity risks being fixed in homogenised categories, and in which an in-group out-group divide is reinforced, echoing, I have discovered, attitudes of ‘collective narcissism’. This study intends to contribute to the much-lacking dialogue around some of the core differences between Socially Engaged Art and Social Sculpture and Connective Practice through its development of new methods and the insights leading to and arising from them. It also asserts that if one is to commit consciously to relational and participatory processes, which encourage an eco-social attitude of co-existence, then a holistic philosophy of engagement is required that builds on the human capacity for genuine self-other listening.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2021

Author dc:creator

• Catanzaro, Beatrice

Contributors dc:contributor

• Sacks, Shelley

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/36fm-zd92

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:ef380187-b5ca-485e-82e6-e2e1480b805a:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1