The CreaTures project set out to explore and understand how creative practice can be a source of change. CreaTures has explored and promoted innovative approaches to societal challenges through a range of different forms of creative engagements. These approaches to eco-social transformation were studied through a systemic review (WP2 – ‘Observatory’), experimenting (WP3 –Laboratory), creating evaluation tools, policy frameworks and an online framework (WP 4 – evaluation) and promoting and ensuring uptake (WP5 – engagement).
The CreaTures Framework, is one of the main outcomes of the project. It sets out how creative practices can stimulate action towards socially and ecologically sustainable futures. Four curated paths through the Framework – Research, Policy Making, Creative Practice and Funding – each offer resources charting the key concepts and terms, processes, and tools for evaluation, for various types of creative practices. The Framework is designed as a website that presents these insights in an approachable and accessible format for a range of audiences. The Framework
• helps the user to engage with and understand, the diverse concepts, approaches, motivations and challenges that our research has identified.
• provides insights about our key learning about the transformational strategies used by creative practitioners.
• contains video messages and stories of practitioners who have engaged in eco-social transformation; their approaches, motivations, goals and hopes for the future.
• offers a detail-rich catalogue of 20 experimental artistic productions conducted as part of the project that address sustainability concerns in distinct ways as educational cases.
• compiles various creative and research materials that invite readers to dive into the theoretical background to these approaches, offering a means to reflect on one’s own – and others’ – creative practice.
• provides reflections and ideas as to what to be considered when evaluating the role of creative practice, in stimulating action
The Laboratory developed descriptions of 20 experimental productions (ExPs) with different thematic focus and scope of engagement. All ExPs addressed large-scale societal problems related to the climate emergency by taking a series of interconnected, localize-able actions. The ExPs were accompanied by a range of diverse engagement activities. The ExPs and associated activities were documented by project researchers together with the ExPs artists themselves and disseminated widely.
CreaTures engagement events, online and in person, reached more that 300 000 people. Invited by the City of Seville, the CreaTures Festival in June 2022 was a considerable effort to assemble our learning, and a significant opportunity for the CreaTures creative practitioners, researchers, other experts and public to come together, share, get inspired, and network. The success of the in-person event has been extended through careful documentation: videos of festival events, and festival exhibition engagements can be watched online.
