Artists who create political and socially engaged work are increasingly at risk. In contexts of protracted socio-political conflicts or post-peace agreements, discussions of safety and protection for social and cultural leaders (where artists and allied activists are situated), are often reduced to mitigating risk to harm and physical violence. Less is known about how artists, allies or their organizations experience those harms and what protection infrastructures they build up to continue collective action. This project identifies how artists and allied activists understand protection and vulnerability based on lived experiences.
This interdisciplinary research connects South Sudan and Colombia. It compares findings from research conducted in South Sudan (2020-2022) with new research in Colombia (2023) to investigate two key questions:
- First, how do artists seek safety in times of conflict and unstable peace?
- Second, how can creative methods be used to investigate vulnerability and map out networks of safety, going beyond the need for artist protection and into collective solidarity within activist communities?
THE RESEARCH TEAM
Principal Investigator: Kara Blackmore
Dr Kara Blackmore is a researcher, curator, and policy fellow at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (FLIA). She will oversee the overall project and support Co-Investigators in their country-specific workstreams. She will use her experience in creative methodologies and curation to lead Workstream 3, culminating in the exhibition in Bogotá. She will also lead on the cross-country mixed-methods paper. As Principal Investigator, Blackmore will take responsibility for the overall delivery of the project.
She has worked on over 20 grant funded projects and is adept at working with professional support staff and overseeing cross-country financial reporting. Within the FLIA, she has experience in managing workstreams on six different UKRI, DFID and Bloomsbury Set projects namely the FCDO-AHRC funded Safety of Strangers and the GCRF funded Politics of Return research projects.
Co-Investigator: José Fernando Serrano-Amaya
Dr José Fernando Serrano-Amaya leads Workstream 1 in Colombia. He uses his expertise in conflict studies, peacebuilding, and activism in Colombia to conduct case study research. His most recent research on the politics and social pedagogies of reconciliation in post conflict settings documented the richness of the practices to transform conflicts, among which arts are very significant.
Serrano-Amaya has experience in Africa and Latin American comparative research, previously researching on issues of gender-based violence and homophobic violence between South Africa and Colombia.
Co-Investigator: Rebecca Lorins
Dr Rebecca Lorins leads Workstream 2 in South Sudan, conducting the Story Circle research. Her background in media, communication and performance arts are essential to implementing the Story Circle methodology with Likikiri Collective.
Lorins has extensive experience working on research projects, recently implementing the Story Circle Method as part of research on three collaborations with University of Portsmouth: the British Academy funded Art Heritage and Resilience, and two AHRC funded projects: Youth Voices and Rethinking Resilience in South Sudan through an Arts-based Curriculum.
Collaborating Artist: Manuela Lara
Manuela Lara has been commissioned to create portraits of artists and social leaders whose experiences of insecurity and efforts for safety help to visualize the research. She will work with Dr Kara Blackmore develop the commission. This work builds off her existing Vivas project that centres on women who have survived the civil war in Colombia. Many of these women are artists themselves and are active social leaders working to keep their communities safe.
Partner: Likikiri Collective / Elfatih Atem
Likikiri Collective is a multimedia arts and education organization located in Juba, South Sudan. Likikiri will support the research through hosting the Story Circles. They will contribute to the research by providing a collective as case study.
Elfatih Atem will lead this in his capacity as the founding Executive Director. He has worked in a leadership capacity for many national Sudanese and South Sudanese cultural projects, as well as a consultant in culture, heritage and the arts for international NGOs and the UN. Likikiri brings an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach to this project, building connections across various sectors, including education, culture, development, and peacebuilding.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
The research findings are connected to 3 areas:
- We have come to understand some of the vulnerabilities in relation to how artists stay safe. We found that for artists working within the creative, cultural and educational sectors there is a real economic constraint to safety since it is costly to pay for cyber-protection, mobility and costs to legal fees for defending their rights to freedom of expression. Working with collectives illustrated that there is a need to be in social proximity to others as a way of ensuring a legitimate protection infrastructure, often already built into existing collective formats, such as unions of weavers/sewers, performers, theatre makers. Here we push the conceptualisation of ‘self-protection’ into a more indexical frame and argue that social dynamics of violence are always linked therefore making the self-as-individual an impossible equation.
- Protection infrastructure as interlinked between
(1) fortification (2) creative process
within this framework we conceive of the notion that curation is a mode of protection, meaning that people in creative spaces collect certain materials and narratives to self-style their presence as a way of staying safe. These processes of selection, contextual evaluation, and public interface – when done in collective formats – creates a kind of fortress to protect the physical and mental wellbeing of the artist. Such a finding is important considering in both Colombia and South Sudan nearly all our collaborating partners and research participants did not see safety as an absence of violence, rather it is a way to withstand the ongoing violence that has been persistent in these contexts. - The value of creative methodologies.
Using arts-based research methodologies to show how issues of safety and vulnerability can be investigated within and outside of artist and allied activist communities, using methods such as art commissions, and curation helped to further protection aims amidst violent conflict because it offered both direct confrontation with the issues and an alternative approach to dealing with issues of violence.
One thing that we found from this research is related to the long-term and cyclical forms of bodily violence that are connected to historical legacies of epistemic violence. Such forms can be traced through symbolic and material lineages that goes beyond narrative-based oral histories. Conversely, we also found (which is not unique to this project) the affirming potential of spontaneous connection that can lead to healing and reconciliation to avert future violent events.
FIND OUT MORE
Project website: https://www.lse.ac.uk/africa/research/Art-Allies
Art Exhibition: https://creating-safer-space.com/art-exhibition-on-colombia-and-south-sudan-2/
