The European Performing Science Night (EPSN) was born in 2021 as a project based on a methodology that combines scientific excellence and the performing arts as a common language to promote open science, increase awareness about research and researchers, its diversity and impact on the daily lives of citizens and stimulate interest in research careers, especially among young people. Based in the Spanish city of Badalona, the event has been hosted by a strong consortium idoneus to combine these disciplines. Lead by Fundación Épica La Fura dels Baus, the EPSN 2021 was carried out with the collaboration of 3 Catalan Universities (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); Universitat de Barcelona (UB); and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)), one French university, Aix-Marseille University (AMU), and finally two research centers Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP) and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, Associated Party of AMU).
Aimed to bring researchers closer to the general public (and vice-versa), the EPSN 2021 proposed a large hands-on experiment using a disruptive language, in which the audience had a key role: contributes, decides, and interacts. The EPSN left behind the passive role of the audience to empower them with the central role of actors in a live scientific experiment increasing, through the experience, their awareness of what research is and the paper of researchers, its function in a democratic society, and its benefits for a diverse Europe.
The EPSN followed a bidirectional approach:
- From the Researchers point of view:
Scientists need to understand how to engage society and what to communicate. Besides a generalized lack of understanding between researchers and civil society, where the general public can often show a lack of interest, research communities need to find new ways of connecting to society leaving no-one behind. This means finding new common languages, new experiences to demonstrate and validate their direct impact on daily life, new spaces for mutual understanding and even new spaces for experimenting with and for society. Such innovative interactions with society can generate new scientific insights beyond mere knowledge transfer and help bridge the gap between specialised scientific knowledge and general knowledge making research results easier to understand by all.
- From the Civil Society point of view:
Citizens need to understand why Europe prioritises investing in scientific research to address current and emerging global challenges (SDG) and how such research impacts everyday life, including the significance of following an EU agenda that highlights core EU features such as democracy and diversity. With the EU increasingly funding user-centric research methodologies, it is therefore crucial to understand the role of citizens in the research process, from the very start of research curiosity. This also means finding ways to trigger interest among potential new European researchers (young people) and/or as validators of real scientific experiments such as the highly relevant, timely ones EPSN proposes.
According to that, How has the EPSN faced the project of scientific communication? Basically targeting the problem also from both perspectives:
From the audience point of view. A cultural activity.
When civil society faces science, some frontiers appear. Even if they consider it interesting or not, important or not, necessary or not, most of them consider it far away from their daily life and of course out of their reach. The stereotype is that science is only available for some in the elite with a special talent, knowledge and language and to take place in special places where they have no chance to contribute, nor access.
In our opinion, this is the main reason why in the past, when we have tried to invite our neighbourhood to a really interesting talk about neuroscience, most of them commented on the importance of neuroscience but nearly none of them came to the talk (Information vs Memory, 2018).
From the researchers’ point of view. An experiment.
Often scientists are too closed and busy in their silos, trying to solve long term global challenges without a clear deadline and pretty overloaded. This together with the frustration they usually feel when trying to communicate with society, don’t let them feel comfortable when working in knowledge transfer to civil society and consider it a burden in terms of ted in our previous experiences, this new concept of performing science allows scientists to have a direct “return on investment”, as they can use the event as a lab-test, and improve their research.
As demonstrated during the project, this new approach is much more valuable for the scientist and impacts significantly on the implication of the research teams (Scientific communication is not anymore only for science lovers and/or Scientific Culture departments, but now also includes researchers). The Performing Science concept, presented in this proposal, comes back to the Renaissance where Leonardo was both an artist and a scientist.
