Project description
Imaginaries of diversity through the works of Afro-European artists
Afro-European arts offer an excellent platform to explore the nuances of postcolonial urban life and transnational sense of belonging that are, however, often ignored in mainstream public discussions. In this context, the ERC-funded ARTIVES project will study imaginaries of diversity portrayed by Afro-European artists in Lisbon and Rotterdam. It will create 'urban artistic archives' (called 'artives') to explore ways of approaching migration-related diversity in a non-essentialist way. The project will analyse creative forms of storytelling, follow artists in their city wanderings, digitally map spaces of inspiration, production and performance, and produce two creative outputs. In this way, ARTIVES will bridge the symbolic, material and affective aspects of how urban communities realise their sense of belonging within highly diverse cities.
Objective
This project will study imaginaries of diversity portrayed by Afro-European artists in Lisbon and Rotterdam in their films, performances and (oral) stories. These stories are not sufficiently related to in the mainstream discourses and the hypothesis is that the arts offer a particularly vibrant textual weft for exploring competing imaginaries of postcolonial urbanity. The two European ports are chosen since they position themselves as ‘open-to-the-world’ in light of their maritime history and ensuing migration dynamic. Yet they significantly differ in the ways that their municipalities frame their multiculturalism.
I will build the framework of ‘urban artives’ – archives of situated stories – to explore non-essentializing conceptualizations of migration-related diversity. By close reading creative forms of storytelling; interviewing and following artists in their city wanderings; digitally mapping spaces of inspiration, production, and performance; and producing two creative outputs, ARTIVES will 1) trace transnational networks of belonging embodied in the local cultural scene and 2) test the possibilities and limitations in relating to these stories in ways that break away with ‘migrantising’ (Wiest 2020) conceptions of society.
This research will transpose recent developments in the field of Critical Archival Studies, namely attempts to account for the transitory nature of identity formation in records’ preservation, to the fields of qualitative culture-oriented Urban Studies and Migration and Transnationalism Studies. In this way, ARTIVES will bridge the symbolic, material and affective aspects of how urban communities realize their sense of belonging and claim agency within highly diverse cities. Furthermore, the project will offer a best practice for working with community-driven knowledge contributing to the ongoing debate in Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Studies on how power relations are implicated in participatory research.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studies
- social sciencessociologyanthropologycultural anthropology
- humanitiesarts
- social sciencessocial geographyurban studies
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands