Participatory game workshops & artistic responses to power & privilege in CACD
We have developed a new method to explore the complex, overlapping power dynamics and privileged assumptions that arise in CACD, so we can co-design respectful participatory practices.
Our artistic exploration focuses on our shared humanity: How is your liberation bound up with mine, and mine with yours?
Co-led by artists and participants from First Peoples, disability, youth and refugee communities, we will develop new games and artworks and create artistic responses to interrogate power, privilege and solidarity in CACD
Our model is based on our 2013-14 ARC Linkage partnership with Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Access Victoria and the University of Melbourne Centre for Cultural Partnerships, which we further developed through our Artistic Director’s (Jen Lyons-Reid) 2014-2016 Australia Council Community Arts Fellowship.
This work draws on our interrogation of the colonial aspects of CACD practice and our unpacking of ‘archetypes' that form a matrix of value and power. We created 52 cheeky, poetic, illustrated character cards, and a series of innovative games and activities as the basic framework for this collaboration.
Our partners want to tailor this method with community participants and us, so it embodies an authentic, diverse voice and can support frontline organizations to be more effective.
We use play to awaken our imagination and explore our assumptions. Sessions are lively, as participants role-play card characters and scenarios. Using games we create a space to critically and playfully reflect on our actions and emotions, to safely explore how we all participate in oppressive behaviors, so we can identify, disrupt and creatively reframe them.
We presented the first Typology of Harm prototype at the international 'Spectres of Evaluation' conference at the Footscray Community Arts Centre Feb 6-7 2014, commissioned by the Centre for Cultural Partnerships, Victorian College for the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Developed by Change Media's Jennifer Lyons-Reid and Carl Kuddell, in collaboration with VCA's Lachlan MacDowall and Marnie Badham and great feedback from the folks at here studio in Melbourne, Michelle Emma James and Ammon Beyerle, the prototype is the first stage of our innovative-disruptive work to create a card game, e-reader and website for self evaluation of harm in art and culture. The prototype presentation was accompanied by a multimedia art installation of our development-in-progress and a hands-on workshop (sculpture, image work, video, mass player lanyard game).