About

Art Beyond Participation – BE PART is a 4-year project initiated by a network of 10 EU and non-EU partners that critically explores the politics and practices of participation in the arts field. From collaborative art-making and sharing to decentralised governance models involving local citizens, artists and policy makers. BE PART sets out to collectively foster new approaches and structures for the co-creation and mobility of art through collaborations of co-creating publics, artists, researchers and organisations. Together we test theoretical frameworks, develop practical methodologies of coming together and institute collaborative working models within the BE PART network and beyond.

Protocol

During the BEPART project, the Critical Network joins the process offering their jointed perspectives and voices to disclose and detect new learnings.

“During these 3 days of the 1st Protocol Drafting Workshop our team of 14 very engaged and passionate artists/researchers shared many personal experiences, observations, ideas, visions, methods, tools and strategies to develop the content of the protocol and think of ways to implement the protocol. We gather all these inputs in an organic and intuitive way in a working document called Protocol Draft 1.0. We consider the seemingly chaotically structured working document a fertile organic field or mine from which we extract inspirations, values, principles and practices.

We defined a series of basic principles we consider universal to the performance art ecosystem and that could become the fundamentals of this long term reflection on a more equal (re)distribution of power within BEPART institutions.”

Read the different versions of the protocol here.

Evaluation

Sophie Hope and Henry Mulhall see evaluation as part of a practice-based approach to research. Over the course of BE PART, they have used evaluation techniques that aim to get a more situated and nuanced idea of what’s happening across the network. They are using methods that aim to get a sense of how various people engaged with the project at different times and places, engaging with micro, meso and macro levels of BE PART.

The evaluation has involved 3 methods; Cards On The Table, Fieldwork Diarists and Blind Dates used to embed critical reflection during the process of BE PART, with an aim to inform the direction of their work, connect people across the network and gather data for further analysis.