Side by Side?

Community Art and the Challenge of Co-Creativity

Maya Lolen Devereaux Haviland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138219861
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315414393
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

A new wave of community arts projects has opened up exciting areas of cross-cultural creativity in recent years. These collaborations of local people, arts facilitators, anthropologists and supporting organisations represent a flourishing new form of arts-based collaborative anthropology that aims to document the stories and cultures of local people using creative art forms. Often focusing on social and cultural agendas, from education and health promotion to advocacy and cultural heritage preservation, participants bring together methods historically linked to anthropology with those from the arts and community development.

Side by Side? – The Challenge of Co-creativity investigates these creative projects as sites of significant cultural creation and potential social change. Through the exploration of a range of diverse collaborations, the common threads and historical contexts in this domain of cultural creativity are examined. The role that creative arts collaborations can have in disrupting existing hierarchies of social power and knowledge creation is analysed, as are the potential futures, historical and cultural implications of these co-creative practices.

Drawing on the experiences and reflections of over 30 facilitators from more than 7 countries, and written by an experienced collaborative arts practitioner and researcher, this exciting forthcoming book will play a defining role in the emerging critical discourse on collaborative art and collaborative anthropology. It is essential reading for collaborative anthropologists, arts facilitators and others who aim to collaborate cross-culturally, as well as students of Art, Anthropology, and related subjects.

1
Considering Collaboration

Precedents

In 1966 Sol Worth and John Adair began a project of collaborative filmmaking with Navajo Indians in the southwestern US (Worth and Adair 1972). That same year in a school in the Appalachian Mountains of the US, graduate teacher Eliot Wigginton began a documentary magazine called Foxfire working with Grade 9 and 10 students from his struggling English class, asking his students to research and document their community and its traditions (Wigginton 1972). In 1967 the Canadian National Film Board (NFB) established the Challenge for Change program, an activist documentary film project, which aimed to address poverty and other social justice issues through participatory filmmaking with marginalised communities across Canada (Waugh, Baker, and Winton 2010). Within a few short years of these three projects commencing, collaborative documentary approaches using increasingly accessible recording technologies had spread across North America and beyond.

These three projects were established by people from outside their host communities seeking to engage local people through collaborative experiences of cultural documentation and self-expression. Worth and Adair believed in the value of better communication within and between groups of people. They were motivated by a desire to better understand the ways that groups of people, in their case the Navajo, “imply meaning through symbolic events” (i.e. self-constructed films) (Worth and Adair 1972). The Challenge for Change program was an initiative of the NFB and several other government departments which saw participatory documentary filmmaking as a way to address poverty through supporting filmmakers to work collaboratively with communities, rather than just documenting them from the outside. It was hoped that these films would both empower the makers and communities depicted in them and create dialogue with relevant agencies and other communities following dissemination of the films (Baker, Waugh, and Winton 2010). Elliot Wigginton was motivated to establish the Foxfire project by a more practical necessity, realising that his first six weeks of conventional English classes, based on his college training, were failing to engage the young people of Rabun Gap (Wigginton 1972). In all of these projects the initiators were guided by recognition of their need to engage the value systems of those they wanted to work with. They each chose to do that by supporting participants to become authors of films, photographs and writing about themselves and their communities. The possibility of generating new knowledge or transforming social relations drove all of these initiatives. The founders were interested in experimenting with methods and forms beyond the usual bounds of their disciplines. They sought to give the means of representation and production to people who had previously been excluded from being the makers of cultural documentation through lack of access to the tools of production and distribution. These three projects went on to be regarded as pioneers of creative collaborative practices in their respective disciplines of film, education and anthropology. They emerged during a time of change in Western approaches to cross-cultural and cross-class encounters in a range of disciplines, and reflect the possibilities for innovation and experimentation that opened up as a result.

This chapter looks at some of the historical projects and disciplinary influences that have shaped contemporary collaborative community arts and arts-based collaborative anthropology. These factors include the crisis of representation across the humanities and arts leading to a collaborative turn in representational practices; a blurring of disciplinary boundaries and a growing dialogue between academia and other forms of social and cultural action, resulting in more creative and experimental forms of representation; and the digital revolution and the resulting rise of technologies enabling user-generated media. Looking back at innovations and debates of the past decades, this chapter sketches the changing understandings of collaboration in representational processes within the fields of arts and anthropology, linking past critiques of these practices to the ongoing challenges of collaborative community arts faced by practitioners today.

Influences

Crisis in Representation and the Collaborative Turn

For anthropology and contemporary art the past five decades have been a time of great change and anxiety about legitimacy of practice, authority of voice, authenticity and agency. Post-colonial movements have challenged hierarchies of knowledge and legitimacy of representations in disciplines across the humanities, arts and social sciences. Western practitioners within these fields have had to respond to altered hierarchies of privilege and power in how they practice and how their work is received. As attitudes to colonialism were changing in the West, resulting in moves to include the voices of marginalised or colonised peoples in representations about them, boundaries between disciplines were beginning to blur. Communication and recording technologies were rapidly developing new forms, and access to them was changing the possibilities of representation and cultural expression within and between groups of people.

James Clifford, author of The Predicament of Culture (1988), argues that ethnographic knowledge and its products must always be understood as located in specific moments of historical power relations. The way authority is conferred based on who one is—in terms of class, ethnicity, professional affiliation or geography—is radically different today than fifty years ago. The emergence of new forms of collaborative and creative cultural documentation in the late 1960s reflects shifting power relations around knowledge production. Projects such as Foxfire, the Navaho Film Project and Challenge for Change sought to include “multi-vocal” representations of cultures and groups and included multiple points of view rather than a singular dominant voice of authority of ethnographies of the past (1988). In today’s terms these projects and their multi-vocal products can be understood as forms of art-based collaborative anthropology.

Collaborative Anthropology and Indigenous Media

Collaborative anthropology is concerned with favouring an explicit shift from practices that generate knowledge based on the agendas and interpretations of the dominant cultural group to a focus on creating knowledge based in large part from the perspective of the culture which is the subject of the inquiry—highlighting so-called “insider” interpretations and agendas (Lassiter 2005). Collaborative approaches to anthropology and ethnography seek to radically restructure the more “traditional” relationship between ethnographer and “informants”; cultural “insiders” and “outsiders”; “authors” and “audiences” of ethnographic research.

Although models of collaborative research have been around for a long time, and collaboration has long been a part of ethnographic endeavours, it has become more explicit in recent times, gaining momentum and distinction in the last decade. Today many within the discipline would argue that collaborative anthropology is more ethical and produces more reliable research results than earlier approaches (Fluehr-Lobban 2008). In anthropology, collaboration is understood as bringing together a number of movements within “new ethnography”—such as postmodernism and feminism (Lassiter 2005). Yet collaboration in anthropology often remains an aspiration more than a reality in the mainstream of the discipline and its genealogy and precedents within and the beyond the discipline are often overlooked. Groundbreaking collaborative practices within visual anthropology, for example, are still surprisingly little known (see for example Ginsburg 1994a, Turner 1995, Ruby 2000).

As early as the beginning of the 1960s ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch articulated a vision for a form of collaborative ethnography. He wrote:

My idea of film is to transform anthropology, the elder daughter of colonialism, a discipline reserved to those with power interrogating those without it. I want to replace it with a shared anthropology. That is to say, an anthropological dialogue between people belonging to different cultures, which to me is the discipline of the human sciences of the future.

(Rouch in Ruby 2000, 1)

Rouch’s ethnographic filmmaking with individuals and communities in Africa significantly influenced collaborative practices in the subfields of visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking (Ginsburg 1991, Henley 2009). Rouch sought to approach his film subjects as active participants in the creative process, beginning by screening his films back to the communities in which they were made, developing feedback processes in which those whom he was filming saw rough cuts of films, suggested alternative films, and became involved in the technical and social aspects of film production and to a limited extent in the films promotion (Henley 2009).

Rouch’s experiments with “shared anthropology” were steps on the road to collaborative creative production. He expressly avoided political agendas and topics in his filmmaking, focussing on the age-old anthropological agenda of recording traditional culture in ways that in later years attracted criticism as colonialist and patronising (Henley 2009, 332). However his concept of shared anthropology laid important foundations for future models of collaborative ethnographic film as well as the movements that are now known broadly as indigenous media (Ginsburg 1994a, MacDougall 1998). Rouch’s approach to filmmaking developed creative production methods that allowed for cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration, changing the social (and to an extent economic) contracts between privileged “first world” academics and filmmakers and those traditionally seen as the subjects of anthropological enquiry.

Many of the early indigenous media projects emerged during a time of growing awareness by indigenous communities and individuals of the efficacy of film and video to communicate their political agendas and present representations of their cultures as vibrant and alive (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002, Torres 2010). As a result innovations in collaborative media production with indigenous communities have often been driven by activist agendas of indigenous people, filmmakers and anthropologists (Michaels 1994b, Turner 1995, Halkin 2008). The founder of the long-running indigenous media project Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages), Vincent Carelli, originally sought to make films in collaboration with indigenous Brazilians as a tool for cultural survival for Indian groups, an agenda that has similarly driven a wide variety of indigenous and non-indigenous collaborations in film and other media in communities around the world over the past four decades (see for example Cavadini and Strachan 2011, Davis and Moreton 2011, Wright 2011). Over time Carelli’s approach to collaborative filmmaking changed to suit the cultural agendas and styles of his collaborators. He developed training programs to teach indigenous people how to make films themselves and developed models of sustained support for collaborative, community-controlled media production by indigenous people. With more portable and accessible video-making tools, indigenous media projects such as Video nas Aldeias became increasingly common through the 1980s and ‘90s, used as tools for political struggles within and beyond the communities in which they occurred.¹

Indigenous media initiatives highlight some important dynamics of collaborative creative production and art-based collaborative anthropology. Who are the authors of these works? Who are the audiences? Who benefits from their production and distribution? In what ways? These kinds of cultural expressions and products are often made initially for external audiences, but they frequently come to play important roles within the communities in which they are made. They may work as forms of cultural preservation, inter-community calling cards and communication tools, or tools for reflection about culture, community and meaning, as I will discuss further in Chapter 2 (Michaels 1994b, Aufderheide 2008).

Indigenous media initiatives seek to put control of representations of indigenous people into their own hands, and increasingly seek to exert some measure of control over the contexts and nature of conversations about and within their cultures and communities. Early indigenous media networks in Australia such as the Broadcasting from Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS) allowed Aboriginal communities to control the flow of mainstream media into their communities. Today Australia is home to NITV, a national indigenous TV channel which broadcasts free-to-air indigenous specific content from Australia and beyond. Initiatives such as Isuma TV (started in Alaska) have taken that one step further by developing online TV channels dedicated to indigenous content, facilitating widespread distribution and access to indigenous media outside of the constraints of traditional media outlets.²

Borrowing Methodologies

Concerns about explicitly addressing issues of power, ethics and authenticity, and the resulting re-conceptualisations of representational practice, have not occurred solely within anthropology. Within contemporary art the rise of “indigenous” and “outsider art” movements and their recognition in art markets have brought to the fore debates about the authority of the voices of artists from different cultural backgrounds. With this have come ethical debates about exploitation, cultural change brought about by art trades, and various incarnations of anxiety about authenticity similar to those articulated in the contexts of indigenous media and anthropology (Dawson, Fredrickson, and Graburn 1974, Morphy 2008). Discussions of agency and authenticity in art practices have shifted in ways that to a certain extent alter previous power structures that favoured the traditionally dominant cultural positions of recognised artists.

In the last fifty years there have been a variety of movements within contemporary art that have sought to alter the relationship between art practice, artists, their subjects and audiences. Beginning with activist art in the 1960s, many artists were looking to be more overtly political through their practices, moving from a primary focus on the art object to works that were drawing attention to social and political relationships and issues; raising awareness or c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Considering Collaboration
• 2 Practices of Collaborative Arts across Cultures
• 3 Interview with Rachel Breunlin: The Neighborhood Story Project
• 4 Axes of Collaboration
• 5 Conflict and Collaboration in the Chiapas Photography Project and the Archivo Fotográfico Indígena
• 6 Co-creativity as an Organising Principle
• 7 Negotiating Futures
• Index