Participation within the Niva to Nenets Project: Three Methods to Communicate, Share and Transfer Knowledge

• Main Author: Van Klaveren, Rosanne
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: artistic research; participation; Arctic; Niva; nenets
• Online Access: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/491429; https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/491429/1//Participation_NivaToNenets.pdf

Participatory art practices can moderate circumstances for people, opinions and traditions to meet. With human relations and social context as a possible point of departure, artists can handle avaried range of skills, methods and tools to create space for shared activities. Artists working with participants can adopt (elements of) existing methods or develop their own. When (participatory) art practice is studied within academia as artistic research, these methods are applied more consciously and the sharing of reflections on their usability is aimed for. In this context, I share some experiences build up from an artistic research project called Niva to Nenets, in which a Lada Niva is driven from Belgium towards the Nenets people in Arctic Russia in order to make an interactive road-movie. Focusing on three stages within this project, I describe how I approached, adapted and applied existing methods to stimulate knowledge sharing. First, I made probe kits for the participants who drove parts of the long road trip with me. This probe method was used during the preparation stage of the project. Secondly, I designed a strategy for public events departing from the format of a television quiz. This strategy is called Picnic-Quiz and was carried out during the road-trip. And thirdly, after the road-trip took place, I reflected on what happened through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This material-semiotic method proved meaningful during the design stage of the road-movie. status: published