Principle #1: co-create
What it is
Co-creation is a design principle that we apply, in service to multiple characteristics of justice and solidarity. Co-creation is an artistic practice where the experience of democracy — shared power — is lived (in both body & mind), multi-sensory, joyful, & meant to unlock creativity.
This principle is important to Street Works because we believe...
Just systems practice democracy — among other things. But we don't all truly understand what shared power is or means. To deeply understand something, it is more important to do than to say. Deep knowledge comes from experience, soul change, and body work. Co-creation helps us experience democracy joyfully, and on a deeper, more authentic level than logic or words can on their own. It also fosters relationships and a sense of belonging.
GoalS
To prioritize co-creation, Street Works aims to:
Collaborate in distributed leadership with specified artists, team members, community members, and aligned experts.
Explore the potential structure and feasibility of collective ownership models alongside & for artists in order to develop them in the future.
Create or present art — as defined by the artist — in which passersby can collaborate in real time, with each other and/or with the artist. This is essential to all Street Works festivals.
Reframe abstractified and disembodied ideas in experiences we can feel, touch, smell, see, talk about, move with, and/or taste. This is essential to all Street Works festivals.
WhY
We're all familiar with looking at a painting on the wall, watching and/or listening to a musician, dancer, or actor on stage, or passively absorbing art and culture. Many of us have also seen arts that are more interactive. Maybe you can touch the object or climb on it. Maybe it responds to you.
Co-creation represents a third, often overlooked art form in which the participant isn't just interacting with an object, song, or performance; they're changing it. While the artist might be critical to design, they are not the sole author of the final work.
We love taking in artwork made by others, but established presenters of the cultural asset ecosystem — like museums and galleries — are dangerous arbiters of cultural value. With their colonial histories, museums have reinforced racist worldviews, dehumanized other cultures, and contributed to wealth gaps. Still, 60% of arts funding went to 2% of large museums in 2017. And their cultural power is rarely democratic, or just. Instead, curation is usually in the hands of a small group of people who are deciding too much about what and whose ideas are worth preserving, amplifying, and paying for.
Co-creative arts aren't a magic cure, but they are one way to learn and demonstrate what shared power feels like, in a world in which it is very common for our beliefs, experience, and words to be disembodied: we say it, but we don’t “get it”; we know, but we don't “live” it; we understand it but we don't “feel it.”
Artists are excellent at building practices of embodiment that help us feel ideas or knowledge at that deeper level. For those of us jaded by democracy, they can also help turn democracy into a joyful act: we witness our actions contributing to a collective thing that has its own beauty. It's creative, fulfilling and fun. It might be a little hard, but not so hard to be out of reach. And that object is precious.
We can build our sense of power in small, joyful acts that get bigger and more complicated. With reinforcement, it's a hop, skip, and a jump to seeing civic action as an art form.
