Resources

Create News 34 – Evaluate This! Thinking out loud on process-based evaluation

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Evaluating socially engaged arts practice can be a sensitive issue. This wide-ranging term describes a variety of artworks and projects, and so, how best to evaluate socially engaged practice evokes competing opinions about its character and value. In March 2023, Create invited Dr Gráinne Coughlan, postdoctoral researcher at TU Dublin, to unpick some of the assumptions around evaluation in conversation with artist Dr. Susanne Bosch. This public event, entitled “Evaluate This!” directly informs the current issue of Create News, in which we invited Gráinne and Susanne to expand on topics discussed during this public event, and to share some modes of thinking about evaluation for socially engaged practice.

published 17 October 2023

related programme Evaluative Framework

Create News 33 – Meditations on the role of the artist in the age of impending collapse

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Rita Marcalo is the Artistic Director of Instant Dissidence, a dance company based in Cloughjordan Ecovillage. As a socially and ecologically engaged company, Instant Dissidence foregrounds the role of dance as a social engine.
In 2020 Rita was awarded the Create and SIRIUS Arts Centre Artist Residency Award, funded through the Arts Council of Ireland’s Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create.
The residency took place within the wider context of Instant Dissidence’s work in dance and the climate emergency. This issue of Create News features the edited transcript of a talk given by Rita at Nordic Street Conference organised by PASSAGE festival / Helsingør Teater (Denmark and Sweden) on 10th June 2022. Rita’s participation at the conference was scheduled as part of Instant Dissidence’s European tour of SlowMo, funded by Perform Europe.

published 17 May 2023

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme

Create News 32 – The Artist Archive, A reflection by Creative Places Tuam Bursary awardees

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Jojo Hynes and Midie Corcoran, Tuam-based artists, were awarded a Creative Places Tuam Bursary in July 2020. The purpose of the bursary was to support and nurture socially engaged artists’ practice, specifically
aimed at artists with a track record of working collaboratively with communities of place or interest. Jojo and Midie have used the time afforded by the bursary to reflect on their experiences as collaborative artists, and to research inspiring collectives and explore best working practices within their community. They were guided in this work by mentor Kate O’Shea.

This issue of Create News features some of their observations and conclusions, in conversation with Kate O’Shea.

published 26 October 2022

related programme Creative Places

Create News 31 – The Power of the Arts in Enacting Social Change

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John Bissett is a community worker who lives and works in Dublin. John has been involved with a broad range of social movements working to effect positive change and to challenge the imposition of policies and actions which dominate and inflict suffering across the social body. He has been involved with grassroots youth and community work in the city of Dublin since the late 1980s. This has led to participation and leadership in many groups and social movements over the past four decades in Ireland, Australia and with groups across Europe. John is currently a member of Housing Action Now and Red Wheelbarrow Productions.

John is currently preparing a book for publication about the lives and struggles of public housing tenants, titled ‘It’s not where you live. It’s how you live’ to be out before the end of 2022. In this piece, John writes about the long history of arts and activism, focusing in particular on his working base of Rialto, Inchicore and Bluebell, in Dublin’s south inner city.

published 22 June 2022

related programme Multi-Story

Create News 30 – Art, Language and Migration

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Francesca La Morgia, originally from Italy, has been involved in a range of community projects primarily with migrant families in Ireland and in the UK for a number of years. In 2017, she created Mother Tongues, a non-profit organisation that aims to support migrant families in raising children with two or more languages. Francesca is the curator of the Mother Tongues Festival, the only festival in Ireland that focuses on multilingualism. This conversation, with Create’s Cultural Diversity Researcher Evgeny Shtorn, encompasses Francesca’s experience as a migrant, an academic, an artist, and her motivation for establishing the Mother Tongues Festival

published 14 April 2021

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme

Create News 29 – Land Walks: A Conversation on Identity, Belonging and the Irish Landscape

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Land Walks is a collaborative sound and visual art project by artist William Bock and residents of West Cork, that maps experiences of belonging and uprooting in the West Cork landscape through walking, storytelling and collaborative field recording.

This issue of Create News is based on a conversation between William Bock, Zoë O’Reilly, researcher and author of recent book ‘The In-Between Spaces of Asylum and Migration’, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, artist and creator of Asylum Archive, Donna Treya from West Cork Development Partnership and project participants Lora Mildred, Mariama Bah and Khanyo Dlamini.

published 8 December 2020

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme

Create News 28 – Utilising Political Imaginaries to Radicalise the Local

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Jeanne Van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to “radicalise the local”. She works on long term community embedded projects that question art’s autonomy by combining performative action, discussions and other forms of organising and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures.

This is an edited transcript of a presentation given by Jeanne Van Heeswijk in Common Ground’s Studio 468 in February 2020.

published 19 June 2020

Create News 27 – Time & Trust: Durational interventions in collaborative art

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Artist Tania Bruguera researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life. In 2018 and 2019, Bruguera created a number of interventions in Tate Modern, including bringing together the Tate Neighbours, people who live or work nearby Tate Modern, to work with her and guide the project whilst exploring the role of the institution in the local area. Tania was keynote speaker at Create’s National Networking Day 2019, held on the 26th September in Millenium Hall in Cork City. This issue of Create News is an edited transcript of the conversation between Tania and Dr. Áine O’Brien, Co-Director of Counterpoints Arts.

published 3 December 2019

related programme Networking Day

Create News 26 – I Am Not a Piece of Meat

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Collaborative Practice and the Body, Anna Furse in conversation with Susanne Bosch

“AN ANATOMY ACT deals with the morbid, but with humour. I’m taking people on an uncomfortable and disturbing journey. I hope people feel comforted by the fact that these taboos about death, our own imminent passing, and of our bodies being opened are somehow okay. It’s ok to have that anxiety. In death we’re all the same. The tone of dead skin is very similar after it has been treated for dissection, no matter what skin colour in life. But the cadaver is both about common human denominators and individual nuances. Surgeons say that every heart is unique. Everybody’s interior has its own character and I find that utterly fascinating.”

published 2 April 2019

related programme Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme

Create News 25 – The Infrastructure of Public Art

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Caroline Cowley in conversation with Grainne Coughlan

“Working with artists within the local authority has the potential to change how we all do things. I am aware too that while the artist may work on these local platforms, their reputational reach is International. I am interested in how the local responds to the global through art, where the site/s are constantly shifting and making different connections back to Fingal.”

published 16 December 2018

Create News 24 – Direct Provision Diary

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Vukasin Nedeljkovic

“There are many people of different nationalities speaking their native languages. Men, women, and children wait impatiently to be assessed. I am brought to a small room where two forensic officials take my fingerprints…”

Vukasin Nedeljkovic is an artist and founder of Asylum Archive. His recent works include Reiterating Asylum Archive: documenting direct provision in Ireland, 2018 and Asylum Archive: an Archive of Asylum and Direct Provision in Ireland, 2016, 2017.

published 1 April 2018

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme
related events Summer School on Cultural Diversity and Collaborative Practice

Create News 23 : Talking Between Statues

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Chris Baldwin

Chris Baldwin, creative director for Galway2020, is widely known for Teatro de Creación, an approach to making large scale interdisciplinary performance about place, for that place and in deep collaboration with the people of that place. He discusses some of his work before coming to Ireland and offers us a glimpse into how his approach will bring interesting insights to Galway´s preparations to become the European capital of culture in 2020.

published 1 November 2017

related programme Artist in the Community Scheme