Facilitation as Creative Practice

At our inaugural meeting at the SAR Forum in Tilburg in 2024, contributors moreover shared a realization that facilitating asserted itself at a central position in our practices, even before we recognized and named it.

Facilitating practices can be identified widely in interactive and community-based art, and in theater and the performing arts, for example using games, props and improvisation. There are intersections with pedagogy and didactics, with professional facilitation and coaching, and with therapeutic work. In comparing notes, we find that we locate facilitating in conjunction with ethics and agency, with vulnerability, joy and communitas.

What does it mean to facilitate in the context of artistic research? How is facilitating integral to designing and conducting studies and research in the sciences and humanities? What is the role of a facilitator? Who agrees to participate in a facilitation setting, and why?

Can facilitation be embedded in an object, a structure, a notation, or an algorithm? Which literatures and theories, which artistic practices are currently being articulated? Why is this focus emerging now? How are we drawing on a greater web?

If your practice contains elements of facilitation or is driven by it, this SIG can be a forum to share questions, techniques and observations. We are interested in research and exposition approaches and in developing publication opportunities.

You may access our detailed schedule for the SAR Conference in Porto 2025 and projects on the online repository via the link below.

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