With the greater push for arts practitioners to develop artistic projects in community spaces, it is essential to examine the skills and capabilities required of those engaging in the field today. Community Inspirations guest contributor Regina De Rozario—artist, writer and researcher—writes about the significance of cultural competence and how it might be fostered through arts-based community work.
Arts and Health is an interdisciplinary field integrating creative practices into community and care settings, aiming to transform health and experiences of healthcare. Community Inspirations guest contributor Salty Xi Jie Ng chats with Michael Tan—creative health practitioner, researcher and educator—about this promising field.
What does co-creation mean to you? At ArtsWok, we see co-creation as an important methodology guiding each of our programmes, such as The Greenhouse Lab, which had its second edition in Yuhua. We interviewed five of the Labbers, and this resulting article serves as a receptacle for their insights on how engaging in co-creation can bring value to arts-based community development. Read further for more ideas on how you too can co-create with others.
Fresh from her sabbatical and as the new Co-Artistic Director of Drama Box, Han Xuemei shares her underlying philosophies that guide her work with communities in our interview with her. Built into her practice with engaging communities is an innate sense of being human that forms the foundation to the relationships involved. Alongside her reflections on this, she offers advice to those wishing to begin working with communities using arts processes.
In this Community Inspirations essay, Thomas Kong shares about his work in social curating and archiving projects. He charts how he and his collaborators discovered this concept and through community art and heritage project Curating Whampoa, developed it further. Deftly weaving art theory with experience, he reflects on the meaning of archives and how the process of compiling and sharing them is a deeply social and participative process.
Pre-Covid-19, socially engaged artist and interdisciplinary practitioner Fié Neo was journeying across America and Europe, where she started and contributed to projects driven by important causes. Back in Singapore now, Fié has many reflections on what she has learnt in her travels: both the beauty and the hard parts of working in, and with communities and wider systems. Get to know Fié, her work and reflections in this Community Inspirations interview.
What is it like to be a trainee in arts-based community development? In this feature, former ArtsWok Collaborative trainee Tay Jing Hui reflects on her experience with us.
How does artist Salty Xi Jie Ng work with people, and create spaces for them in which they are free to express themselves? In her feature piece, Salty shares about her projects which have been co-created with diverse groups of people, during her time overseas in the USA and here in Singapore. We invite you to read her in-depth, fascinating insights on the magic that is created when different individuals bring their true selves to the space of collaborative art-making.
M1 Peer Pleasure's "What If", stood for many open-ended questions, which grew with the onset of Covid-19. Read our new Community Inspirations piece, composed of the voices of What If, through interviews we conducted with the cast, designers, production manager and directors. This is a collection of our diverse team’s personal experiences, challenges and learnings, in creating this originally devised, digital production about the perspectives of our cast with disabilities.
How has community-engaged art been kept alive during this period of Covid-19? After a call we put out in July to ask arts practitioners about their experience, this article explores how their work has been affected and evolved, how space and digitalisation have played a role in this, and what new insights they have gained from this experience.
