Art and culture today present a specific field where, on the one hand, the public is formed as a multitude of subjectivities that work and engage in the socio-political space, and on the other, the artists are becoming increasingly important social agents. Social and cultural spaces are built by different actors, and our aim is to create a space of conviviality. We aim to do so by creating social, political, artistic, and cultural platforms, on which we will base and present our research. The outcome is to develop research that in an accessible and communicable way invite, involve, and engage different audiences and social actors. In this regard our position is that the choice of the format and methodology of arts-based research precisely addresses the shifting role of different actors in contemporary society.
The lead research questions of this project are as follows:
How can we rethink the constitution of European history and memory in the context of the prevailing discourses of silence, oblivion, and amnesia that provoke discrimination and differentiation, i.e. racism and anti-Semitism being two of the most evident and palpable?
What connects three seemingly disparate and chronologically distant events in Austria, Belgium and B&H/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska”?
What are the specific procedures societies have developed for not dealing with silenced histories?
Which contemporary politics of empowerment and strategies against politics of oblivion can we conceive? How can such processes of emancipatory empowerment be addressed, initiated, and facilitated through theoretical and arts-based practices and research?