The following is an excerpt from my latest book Near and Far, which is about how the arts impacts interdisciplinary collaboration.
Introduction
Near and Far looks at how arts workers (or other creatives), their practices, content and ideas impact collaborations. How can they enrich, challenge, and affect the projects and teams they work with?
Late in 2022 the penny dropped.
I had been reviewing the work I had been doing during the long Melbourne lockdown regimes, which had allowed me to focus full time on my practice of non-fiction writing, facilitation, and process mentoring. My primary focus – understanding people’s experience of creativity and helping them to develop a sense of creative identity – was as strong as ever. But I suddenly had the realization that the contexts that had given me the most joy were ones in which artists, artistic methods, or content had been included in multi- inter- or transdisciplinary collaborations.
I have always been fascinated by what happens when an artist or a designer sits down at the table with a bunch of other people from different sectors. Where is there resistance, where is there ease, what exactly stimulates new thinking, and how do people transcend their habitual ways of working to make their collaboration a success?
As a creative, and former arts worker, I fervently believe in the power of artists and artistic content to enable shifts in thinking, feeling, and acting. The arts holistically engage the emotions, intellect, and instincts and in so doing opens avenues for growth and change. Immersion in the arts also fosters powerful capabilities in creative and innovative thinking, something that is needed to tackle the many wicked problems that we all face.
I decided to probe this belief and explore the experience of creative people who step outside of their socio-cultural ghettos to work with others as well as people who work in ‘non-creative’ sectors who have chosen to incorporate the arts in their work.
I chose seven people or organisations and approached each one for an interview about the arts and creativity as a transversal force within interdisciplinary collaborations or in cross cultural settings. Mostly I was steering by instinct, choosing potential interviewees because I admired the work of them or their organisations. I was happy to talk to whoever said ‘yes;’ if there was any semblance of planning it came down to my trying to approach a range of people or organisations across disciplines to get a diverse array of views.
The conversations yielded incredibly rich material for me to work with. Wrestling it into an engaging format has not been easy because there were so many nuances to work with. I hope that what I have done resonates with you.
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