PeaceMAPP: Art and Peacebuilding
Background
The PeaceMAPP project (Peace through Music, Art, Poetry and Performance) focuses on the nexus between art and peacebuilding. In conflict regions around the world, artists and cultural workers are making significant contributions to transforming conflict and building sustainable peace. Performances are facilitating relationships across the lines of enmity. Ritual, Ceremony and theatrical works are mediating between competing historical narratives. Performance and visual art are supporting communities to acknowledge violations of human rights, to mourn losses, and to empathize with the suffering of others. In the aftermath of violence, artists and cultural workers are negotiating the complex ethical terrain inscribed by testimonies, imperatives toward justice, and desires for peace. These works of art engage people in experiences that open possibilities for new insights and new relationships. Aesthetic engagement can engender transformations in consciousness, social relations, cultural practices, and legal arrangements.
As part of the PeaceMAPP project, ACPACS has hosted two arts and peacebuilding workshops, bringing together a diverse range of artists and peacebuilders who have explored the ways in which their fields can be interwoven in ways that facilitate sustainable conflict transformation and peacebuilding.
Partners
ACPACS is currently involved in the creation of an anthology entitled Acting Together on the World Stage: The Creative Transformation of Conflict. Dr. Polly O. Walker is one of the co-editors of the text, along with Dr. Cynthia Cohen, Executive Director of the Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence and Director of Coexistence Research and International Collaborations at Brandeis University; Ms. Roberta Levitow, founder of Theatre Without Borders; and Roberto Varea, director of the Performance and Social Justice Program at the University of San Francisco. This anthology documents promising contemporary examples of compelling performance works directly linked to conflict transformation. It incorporates case studies that situate performances in their relevant historical, social and political contexts, describing both the productions and the processes leading up to them. The framing chapters assess their impact and evaluate their contributions to establishing sustainable peace in their region of the world. The volume is designed to be a resource for artists, cultural workers and peacebuilding practitioners working in conflict regions, as well as for scholars and students of Performance Studies, Conflict Transformation, and related fields.
Enquiries
Please contact p.walker2@uq.edu.au.
