Reflections in water:Displaying political agency through costume, performance and video

This research revisits individual and collaborative artistic processes to articulate the combination of creative skills to produce and document research outcomes. Various creative processes, such as costume-making, performance-making, artistic video, photo documentation and editing, came about under particular circumstances and with different objectives. These processes, all with their unique and embedded stories, were brought together in a collaborative research outcome to create an original visual story with layered meanings – the video titled ‘Merelle (To the see)’ (Miettinen 2021). This video illustrates the connections between the different creative processes, and the memories, bodies, places and environments attached to them. However, some of the places and environments in which the costumes, performance and video came about were also implicit, only to be revealed in the research dissemination. The selected methodology entailed narrative accounts, reflexive research and collaborative visual analysis. The data were collected through storytelling and note taking of the events that enabled re-narration of the three artistic processes described in this article.scp 7 (1) pp. 109–126 Intellect Limited 202

Introduction

The relationship between artistic processes and the promotion of different social relations have characterised discourse in the arts and other fields like education, activism and cultural policy for many years. However, studies on strategies employed in the documentation of social engagement in art are less common, making Documents of Socially Engaged Art a timely and significant contribution to the debate on social practice in contemporary artistic practices. In three sections, this collection of essays studies different modes of documentation that are employed in collaborative artistic or design processes, including multiple approaches that reflect artists’, participants’, academics’ and educators’ viewpoints. As innovative archives are produced, new partnerships are formed, transforming these audio-visual and other documents into veritable works of social engagement rather than mere reproductions of artworks or performances

Is money a dirty word?:The entrepreneurial worlds of art and sculpting

When we think of marginalisation, artists come to mind less often. This artistic and design-thinking experiment investigated artists' attitudes after engaging in an empathy-hack with business mentors and service designers. The empathy-hack was based on the Self-Hack concept used for individuals to engage in life design and life-skill development. Self-Hack was developed by Creativity Squads in 2019, a Finnish association established at the Tampere University of Applied Sciences (Pilch and Vessa-Matti 2019).The experiment explored how the arts can function as a vehicle for constructing entrepreneurial worlds, especially for artists who often operate on the margins of entrepreneurial environments. Furthermore, the experiment encouraged artists to improvise by delving into their own unique talents and abilities and collaborating with business mentors and service designers to take a bold leap and cross the divide between art and business worlds.<br/

Love Talks and Neighbourhood:Promoting encounters, tolerance and social inclusion by means of art in daily life and the living environment in Finnish Lapland

This article will introduce the Love Talks and Neighbourhood (later Love Talks) project, part of the AMASS, Acting on the Margin: Arts as Social Sculpture project. Love Talks was realised in Finnish Lapland in 2020, as part of an effort by local artists and art education students to explore how arts initiatives can build tolerant, community-focused neighbourhoods, while reflecting on how such activities can be scaled up to larger initiatives. The artists and art educators involved in the project took on the roles of teachers, developers, enablers, curators, facilitators, producers and creators of a new dialogic operational culture. The project asked whether socially engaged art can provide new tools for social interaction and increased collaboration. Can it lead to a new dialogue, critical discussions and new forums for participation? This paper highlights the importance of paying attention to how activities are organised and realised in the diverse and often challenging environments characteristic of socially engaged art and community-based art education. It explores how to promote encounters, tolerance and well-being through the use of art, and the role of culture and art in promoting social inclusion, capacity building, networking and participation in daily life and living environments.peer-reviewe

Exploring mapping tools for service design through the Voitto project

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Margin to Margin: Arts-Based Research for Digital Outreach to Marginalised Communities

This article discusses the artistic activity titled ‘Conversations with the edge’ that was executed by communities in Australia, Russia and Finland, and curated for an exhibition at the Helinä Rautavaara Museum in Espoo, Finland in 2017. This activity was created in the context of Margin to Margin: Women living on the edges of the world, a larger arts-based research project that took place between four geographical margins: outback South Australia, Finnish Lapland, Russian Kola Peninsula and Namibia. Margin to Margin was a collaboration between artist communities with the aim to explore the relationship between art-making and empowerment of makers living and working ‘on the edges’. The aim of the project was to understand the realities marginalised communities face whilst giving voice to these communities by exhibiting their art in various formats, stimulating digital participation and utilising technology for digital inclusion. The purpose of the article is to develop a model that will guide virtual arts-based project mediation for digital outreach in both urban and regionally situated marginalised communities