Project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation
Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation (WPC) is a collaborative research project and transnational platform conceived by the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange (TrACE) network. The project was funded by a Social Innovation Grant from the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities and was realized from January 2020 to August 2023 regarding its German part, while some WPC teams and its publication output still operate until 2024.
Institutionally, the WPC platform is constituted by four national teams spanning Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. They pool together, mutually supplement and enhance their broad array of disciplinary expertise as well as pivotal experiences as pioneering institutes of transnational and transcultural studies in the fields of art.
Theoretical and methodological approach
The project aims to develop a critical art theory and practice based approach to social innovation. Following these aims, WPC targets to change public narratives about our globally interconnected yet conflicted world through art, exhibitions, conferences and (academic) writing about art and its cultural, historical and socio-political realities. New stories are to be told from multiple regional perspectives about our transnationally and transculturally entangled presents, as well as our shared and sometimes difficult pasts, to imagine new ways of living together in the future.
WPC draws upon worlding as its central methodology. The concept of worlding understands the global as actively co-produced from multiple and complex locales, in contrast to dominant discourses rooted in a notion of the global as a passive effect of global capitalism. Going beyond current top-down models of "inclusion", "diversity" and other representations of the "global", the concept of worlding grounds the global within local worlds and allows entangled histories to emerge, opening pathways to decolonize universalizing Western narratives and epistemologies.
Academies and Workshops
A series of six academies is at the heart of WPC’s process. These academies were organized in collaboration with international public institutions – with the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Tate Modern London, the National Museum of World Cultures Amsterdam, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin respectively. The WPC Academies reimagined cultural and educational institutions beyond modern Western and colonial frameworks and repositioned them as agents of social and political change that increase our understanding of the global world's complexities. The academies were designed to enable transatlantic, multi sectoral, and public knowledge sharing between those working in and on different geocultural contexts.
The cross-institutional conception of the academies was part of an attempt to socially innovate existent institutional infrastructures and conventions of how academia, museums, and their diverse publics relate to each other. The academy programs were therefore designed to interrelate with exhibitions or other relevant activities of the partner museums and institutions:
- Ottawa Academy: Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization (November 2019)
- Workshop-cum-seminar Decolonial Theory, Transculturation, and Latin American Positions – Entangling Art Histories, Heidelberg/zoom, 16-18 June 2021
- Amsterdam Assembly: Letting go of having to speak all the time, 7-9 October 2021
- London Gathering: Consent not to be a single being, 1-3 Decembr 2021
- Heidelberg/Dresden Academy (Part 1, Dresden): Lessons Learned? Transcultural Perspectives on Curating and Pedagogies, 14-16 Juli 2022
- Heidelberg/Dresden Academy (Part 2, Heidelberg): Lessons Learned? Die Lehre neu denken: Ein ‚Denk-Raum für das [Ver-]Lernen von Kunstgeschichte, 20 July 2022
- Heidelberg/Berlin Workshop (Part 3, Berlin): Worlding Art History through Syllabies
- Montréal Conference & Exhibition: Worlding Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Bridging Knowledges, Practices, and Beings, 31 March -1 April 2023
Heidelberg’s WPC team had prepared its three-partite academy in smaller workshops (taking place at the GRASSI Museum Leipzig and in the Japanisches Palais Dresden in cooperation with SKD), allowing research members and museum staff as well as students to repeatedly interact in closer ways. Enhanced by intensive tours through archives and collections as well as critical conversations behind the public facades of these institutions, the activities allowed to address the urgent question of how to imagine and enable public cultures “otherwise”.
Crucially, academies as well as workshops were organized in collaborative ways to highlight speakers from regions beyond the transatlantic and acknowledge the diverse art-related positionalities of public cultures by bringing scholars into dialogue with artists, activists, curators and other arts professionals.
WPC data base
WPC has also established a database pilot that allows critically worlding its multiple entries - on exhibitions and academic events related with transnational, transcultural, post-colonial and decolonial agendas - via meta-comments that make visible the limited/limiting epistemic frames governing the underlying CIDOC CRM database framework. The pilot is publicly accessible via the main WPC website (see hyperlink to the right).
Publications
WPC’s ambitious chapbook series is published by ICI Berlin Press, appearing in open access as well as print-on-demand format following an academic peer review and catering to more-than-academic audiences. Publications pertain to three registers: a comprehensive conceptual chapbook discussing key words that inform WPC discourse and practices (forth-coming 2025), four academy-based chapbooks reflecting on the discussion fostered by these events including selected contributions by distinguished speakers, individually authored case-studies that “trouble” archives and canonizational processes of art and public cultures, and several companions, which explore best practices in curating as well as academic teaching and the “how to” of social innovation in the fields of art. These emergent publications are sidelined by the WPC blog that is hosted on the main WPC website.
By conducting research on and for institutions of public culture, Worlding Public Culture has been an agent of social innovation that impacts how the global is theorized, collaborating with and making concrete recommendations for the education and museum sectors and, ultimately, contributing to the creation of a more resilient society with more elastic models of social cohesion through shifts in public discourse.
