What

CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures – activates and explores artistic practices oriented towards environmental and social sustainability, emphasizing participation processes, spaces for reflection, and collaborative production in the artistic field. Many creative practices have demonstrated their potential for social transformation, but they tend to be highly contextual, often poorly archived and disseminated. Between January 2020 and December 2022, CreaTures developed various strategies and activities to investigate the transformative potential of artistic and creative practices. ZEMOS98 was involved in various ways:

• Providing the cooperative board game Commonspoly as a study object for the project’s Observatory. A network of game ambassadors was created to test and document different games in Spain, Finland, Greece, and Italy.
• Fostering and co-organizing the CreaTures Festival, held in June 2022 at the Artillery Cultural Center in Seville, as the project’s final celebration, with over 50 international participants and attracting around 600 people in person. The festival featured lectures by Alexandra Pirici, Lucia Pietroiusti, and Jose Luis de Vicente, as well as an exhibition of 24 experimental productions that were part of the project. The CreaTures Festival has a project catalog edited by DPR Barcelona (coming soon).
• Recording and editing the project’s documentary. A piece that provides an in-depth understanding of the project and interviews the key artists and researchers who participated in CreaTures.
• Coordinating Messages in a Bottle, an online repository of reflections on transformative creative practices, featuring interviews with people involved in the project and summarizing the main ideas in 10 learnings.

How

CreaTures conducted pilot research associated with different artistic and educational practices that demonstrate how collaboration and direct participation are crucial to redirecting public discourse towards the importance of environmental issues. In this way, CreaTures comprises three interconnected parts:

• Observatory, to identify and map local creative practices with the potential to stimulate public debate on the importance of environmental, cultural, and social sustainability in alternative ways of life.
• Laboratory, which relies on experimentation and collaboration among various actors to create experimental productions (ExPs) of different dimensions that explore the mobilizing capacity of art.
• Evaluation, a place to connect different creative practices to create shared learning spaces and potential systemic impact.

CreaTures is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 program and is developed through the coordination ofAalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (FI) in partnership with the universities of Sussex, Utrecht, and RMIT, as well as creative organizations such as Furtherfield (UK), Hellon (Fi), Kersnikova (Si) o Superflux (UK), among others.

Why

CreaTures has been an opportunity to apply professional research techniques to increase our understanding of the impact of creative practices. Often, the indicators used in the cultural and creative sector tend to rely on quantitative evaluations, and while these are relevant for certain issues, they sometimes overlook many qualitative aspects that can be truly relevant when analyzing the social and political impact of some artistic practices. CreaTures has laid the groundwork for methodologies that allow for a fairer analysis of certain creative practices and a community interested in delving deeper into these issues.

Resources

CreaTures Website