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Cursus: ME3V15005
ME3V15005
Community Art: Practice and Theory
Cursus informatie
CursuscodeME3V15005
Studiepunten (EC)7,5
Cursusdoelen
The aim of this course is to reflect on the relationship between the arts, society, policy and criticism through the prism of community arts. Community arts are practices that combine elements of performing arts, visual arts, music and media in hybrid and often intermedial formats, always with a strong connection to the social context from which these practices emerge. In this course, we explore community arts in all its manifestations, and we consider the potential of this kind of practice for social and political intervention. We examine the questions community art and artists pose to institutionalized art and music criticism, arts policy, and scholarly research on the arts. Students will also be trained in ethnographic and audiovisual methods of gathering and reproducing data for their blog reports. These practical skills as well as the direct interaction with actual community arts processes and professional community artists working in the field will substantially contribute to the future career orientation of the students enrolled in this module.
Inhoud
This course provides the student with a critical introduction to the practical and theoretical dimensions of community arts. Community arts can be loosely defined as a way of creating art in which professional artists collaborate more or less intensively with people who do not normally actively engage in the arts. The basis for this practice is a carefully constructed and maintained reciprocal relationship between artists and non-artists, from which original, innovative and socially relevant art emerges. Community art involves all arts disciplines and can be found in all corners of the world: in immigrant working-class areas, in prisons, in rural communities, in (former) war zones, etc. In the Netherlands, for example, it is a rapidly expanding field that operates mostly, but not exclusively, outside of the mainstream or avant-garde. Because it challenges traditional notions of (autonomous) art-making, community art reconfigures existing art theory and criticism in an attempt to validate itself both socially and culturally. The course familiarizes students with the diversity of community arts practices around the world and with the wide range of scholarly perspectives on community arts. As small, multilingual research teams, students will conduct fieldwork in ongoing community arts projects in Utrecht or elsewhere in the Netherlands, blog their results, and present these to the class each week.

This course is an advanced module in the Creative Cities minor.

LAS and TCS students who follow this course as part of the core curriculum of their major, need to complete a compulsory preparation course/assignment. See for more information: https://tcs.sites.uu.nl/
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