How to Hear More: Exploring the Politics, Potentials, and Problematics of Listening and Storytelling in Community Engaged Art

In: https://digitalcollections.saic.edu/islandora/object/islandora%3A107288

Abstract

There is so much knowledge in the stories and experiences of communities across the world. In times of crisis we tend to look towards experts to provide solutions. But while innovation and technology are valuable tools, we must also look to the direct experiences and lived knowledge of those who have already been impacted and have already needed to develop a response. We can collaborate across context in order to hear what those around us already know and re-orient towards decolonization. Art and education are vital tools for this, but how can we be art educators in an authentic, ethical, and respectful way to learn how we as a species can come together and survive the climate chaos, violent inequity, and daily injustices of the present? For my thesis research I investigated the politics, problematics, and potentials of listening as a component of anti-authoritarian community engaged art. I asked such questions as: How would artists and cultural workers describe listening as an active practice in their work? What are some ways that sharing stories can disrupt historical relationships towards power, knowledge, and expertise? What shared ethics should be considered when holding other people's stories? For this project I interviewed 13 people working as collaborators in communities primarily in Chicago and Philadelphia. Those who I interviewed might call themselves curators, activists, photographers, teachers, musicians or urban planners, but they share a vision for witnessing and celebrating the experiences of everyday people. Some people I knew beforehand through my own work and others I met for the first time when I interviewed them in the fall and winter of 2019-2020. In addition to the case studies I conducted through interviews, I made a series of drawings in response to what I learned. I coded the transcripts according to themes that were used to develop a series of posters about the major ideas that the artist/educator/activists talked about including mutual learning, local expertise, self knowledge, and making as listening. Through my interviews, a need for context-driven thinking emerged. Various differences contributed to the wide variety of approaches such as demographics, histories, relationships towards power and resources, creative roles, and world visions. To this end, I have not come out of this project with a one-size-fits-all strategy but rather a more complex web of intersecting, overlapping, and contradictory stances towards listening and sharing stories. The implication for my practice and for others at a similar early career point is to lean into specificity, to build local relationships slowly, and to never assume you entirely know what you're doing.