Collaborative art-making

The ‘collaborative artmaking’ method requires participants to deliberate about a complex topic that may evoke strong feelings and opinions.

Its purpose is to improve relationships by working together on a complex, possibly sensitive topic with additional tools to speech. Participants will visualise and experience that different people and groups can disagree but still create something together.

Through the challenging process of agreeing on how to make one final piece, people may see other options, which may alter their opinions.

Things to consider

The method was originally designed to make connections between policy makers and others who they have not had strong relationships with, but can be used to bring together any set of disparate groups with no history of collaborative working.

It may lead to groups considering each other’s differing viewpoints.

It can be conducted through any artform and may be more successful if culturally relevant or familiar artforms are chosen.

The method builds on a history of environmental deliberation techniques. Environmental decision-making traditionally used rational, systematic approaches, such as cost benefit analysis, to identify a single ‘best’ solution to a problem. This approach is unsuited to complex problems that are influenced by values and emotions as well as logic and quantification.

Practical steps

1. Participants in a workshop should be from multiple sectors or reflect different viewpoints. This can include policy, community, civil society and art.

2. Consider how you may need to adapt your plans if there are people with disabilities, or other special needs during your interactions with them. For more information and practical advice, see our introduction to disability-inclusive research.

3. The key issue of the workshop should be loosely defined, and relevant to the participants (e.g. flooding).

4. Facilitators should include an artist, a facilitator and a communications professional. These three roles could be carried out by the same person if they have the relevant skills.

5. Start by giving examples of collaborative artworks.

6. Discuss the key issue and make the workshop objectives clear – likely developing relationships, but maybe also to explore divergent ideas or communicate a message to a public audience.

7. All individuals discuss what they are going to create and work together to make one final artwork, rather than multiple individual works. The artwork may build on the discussion of the key issue to a greater or lesser degree. Suggestions of how to run specific activities are described in detail in How to use collaborative art-making for dialogue and communication, but could be poems, drama, collage, painting/drawing, dance, song/ music, creative writing, sculpture, music-making, mask-making, pottery, textile work, photography, video etc. Each person can contribute one part, e.g. one line of a song/ poem, one image in a group collage/ drawing, one movement in a dance, but there will need to be discussion about the overall form of the piece of work. Some components (e.g. a song recording) can be completed after the workshop, but the main artwork should be completed during the workshop.

8. Record the activity, including individuals’ comments as they work.

9. Discuss the process of creating the artwork. Participants explain what they think of the final artwork and what it means, what they gained from the experience and how it made them feel, and whether and how their understanding and opinion of the key issue has changed.

Following up

It’s important to manage expectations at the start of the process. This should mean that participants can contribute, feel happy about their contribution, understand the time commitment and leave the process without guilt at a moment that suits their lives. This may be at the end. If the process takes longer then 6-8 weeks, it’s vital to be transparent about milestones which should include moments when people can leave guilt free and happy about the contribution they have made.

If you’re using this method as part of a larger participatory research project, you may have included follow-up activities such as validation workshops, or monitoring, evaluation and learning activities. Be aware that not everyone wants to participate in everything.

Mini case study

In the “Art, Environment and Activism in Africa” project, the Institute of Development Studies worked in 5 countries – Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Ghana and Senegal.

In each country, the team facilitated a workshop where different groups of policy, citizen, research and art stakeholders got together to do some types of collaborative artistic activity on an important environmental issue they were concerned with. The team already knew there was a lack of communication between those groups, and the aim was to come to some common understanding about contentious issues, and particularly to see if policy actors and others could communicate and deliberate through this medium.

In the workshops, the project team were investigating contentious issues where the different groups had different views, based on values and identities, so the team were wondering if the art could help them explore those and deliberate, i.e. come towards ways forwards.

In several contexts, there was so little contact between groups that they had not yet developed the trust necessary to be able to work together. In these cases, the experience of working together on an artwork served to develop working relationships between them. It was, in itself, an achievement for them simply to be able to work together. In other groups, the artwork served as a space in which individuals explained to each other their feelings and experiences to do with the subject at hand, in ways that were easier to explore in an arts-based exercise than a discussion.

Take a look at the collaborative art below, including a song, creative writing and painting.