The CreaTures project creates opportunities for collaborative action and widely accessible knowledge transfer among diverse stakeholders, including creative practitioners, members of the public, policy actors, and scientific communities. The project is fundamentally participatory, deliberately reaching out for and actively listening to the voices of marginalised or disengaged groups and individuals, thereby maximising its social impact. Engagement events set up in the project take place in diverse forms and different temporal scales, often supporting the development and maintenance of relationships with and among these key stakeholders.
The experimental productions (ExPs) developed in the laboratory have provided ample opportunities for co-creative engagements, following a variety of formats including workshops, exhibitions, performances, courses, LARPs, gameplays, experimental walks, as well as picnics and sharing circles. CreaTures engagement researchers work closely with the creators of ExPs and stakeholders to care-fully curate, design, activate, and hold spaces for various activities specific to each ExP’s contexts. To further extend public engagements with the emerging project insights, we have organised a series of online public seminars, set up the CreaTures newsletter, published a zine series, and helped to facilitate the CreaTures-affiliated art tech nature culture network.
In June 2022, we organised the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain that brought together experiences from across CreaTures work packages and the ExPs as well as contributions by external experts across the areas of creative practice, research and policy. Through a rich program consisting of an exhibition showcasing the ExPs as well as various local artworks, workshops, keynotes by guest speakers, and conference sessions featuring contributions by the consortium members and invited experts, the Festival attendees were able to explore the power of creative practices in fostering positive eco-social change. The festival catalogue is out now!
The engagement activities have been rounded up with the Messages in a Bottle – a co-creative experiment that corresponds with the Open Creative Practices Training Guidelines task calling for an accessible guide for current and future creative practitioners aspiring to pursue transformative practices to make effective uses of the project’s key research outcomes.
