Spaces of communication, connection and language: In an interdisciplinary international multi-sector collaboration, whose language is it anyway?

Artists have come to play crucial roles in creating collaborative spaces with community groups where injustices, inequalities and social conditions can be spoken, explored and challenged. While this practice has taken root around the world, in parts of Latin America such practices have been connected explicitly to activist and transformative political change. This presentation will explore the artists’ role in creating the conditions where change and transformation can be collectively imagined, and sometimes practically realised. This will be discussed by bringing new theory on the spatial affective practices of socially engaged participatory artists into dialogue with the experiences and early findings of a recent UK Research Council study, which brought together artists, activists and academics from Brazil, the UK and Mexico, to interrogate the qualities of transformative creative spaces and how they are achieved.