Participatory Art Based Research – Responses to Ways of Working Together

SYMPOSIUM 26 FEBRUARY 2021, 3:00 – 9:00 PM Online

In the last two decades, many different proposals and concepts of artistic and art- based research have been developed and explored. Participatory Art Based Research (PABR) is one of them. Since 2012, 50 participatory research projects were realised, which brought together more than 2000 researchers, co-researchers and participants from all areas of society, art, and science.

For the official launch of our online publication we invited to an online symposium and presented the online resource of PABR that aims to summarise strategies, potentials and problems of participatory art- based research and make them widely available.

To celebrate the launch of the PABR website, we discussed our approaches and research formats with other experts and practitioners from the field of artistic research – in what ways can we do research together?
For this celebration we invited special guests Jamie Allen, Kai van Eikels, Anke Haar- mann, Marijke Hoogenboom, Brandon LaBelle, and Isabelle Stengers. Each panel offered the possibility to participate: All participants were invited to join discussions in breakout rooms (panel 1 and 2). Plenary sessions (panel 1, 2 and 3) are hosted by Kerstin Evert and Kathrin Wildner.

The symposium was organised and facilitated by Kerstin Evert, Sebastian Matthias, Sibylle Peters, Esther Pilkington, Melcher Ruhkopf and Kathrin Wildner.

It was held in English.

 

PROGRAMME
Panel 1, 3:00 – 5:00 pm: What did we do?

Sibylle Peters & Sebastian Matthias (PABR), Marijke Hoogenboom, Kai van Eikels

This panel introduced PABR and its approaches: How was PABR practised in Hamburg as a cooperation between art institutions and a university? What ways are there to organise and enable participatory and artistic research?

 

Panel 2, 5:30 – 7:30 pm: What can you do with it?

Jamie Allen, Anke Haarmann, Brandon LaBelle in conversation with Kathrin Wildner

In this panel, we looked at the formats of participatory and artistic research from different perspectives: Are the suggested research formats useful? How could they be developed further? What other practices and experiences are there in the field?

 

Panel 3, 8:00 – 9:00 pm: Workshop presentation of Doubt and Failure in Participatory Art-based Research

Sibylle Peters and Isabelle Stengers with workshop participants

This workshop presentation looked back at the afternoon’s discussions and talks.