Here we provide a brief summary of Dr Claartje Rasterhoff’s opening address at last year’s conference organised jointly with EAB in Berlin ‘Connecting Cultures: Empowering citizens – A conference on European cultural, political and citizenship education’.
In her keynote speech, Dr Rasterhoff addressed the question: How does the artist, the cultural institution and the interaction with the academic world contribute to citizenship education, the building of communities and the formation of social spaces?
She outlined how the cultural sector is increasingly focusing on social relevance, prompted on the one hand by major societal challenges, like polarisation, misinformation or climate crisis and on the other as a backlash against the decades-long economisation of cultural policy. But this shift comes with promises and sales pitches on the policy level such as: ‘The arts are an endless source of imagination and invention of new approaches to complex changes, they are a powerful mobilisation and awareness-raising tool.’
These narratives obscure the politicality of the art and heritage field. In its attempts to show that art matters to society, this solutionism fails to recognise that art does not exist outside of society. It also comes with tensions for cultural institutions, that have to undergo an institutional transition towards fostering active citizenship and democracy, strengthening their relationship with their communities.
To find out how practitioners and audiences experience and engage with arts and heritage, we need art-science collaborations. The gap between academic research and cultural practice hampers meaningful discussion on the role and impact of arts organisations and has to be bridged, and binaries like making/thinking must give way to non-binary modes of knowing and learning that can inform our understandings of the civic role and impact of arts and culture.