Keynote by Professor Allan Owens, University of Chester, UK (Wednesday 31 May, 9:00-10:00 AM)
In participative interactive arts-based encounters the concern is with understanding of self, other, society and planet as a profoundly humanizing, democratic project. Artistic skills, forms expressions and processes are used to explore, represent, challenge and understand human experience, those without a voice, the vulnerable, non-human creatures and the environment itself. Methods are active, multi-perspectival, imaginative, creative, expressive, interpretive, question posing, curiosity driven and designed to generate learning in non-artistic domains. We collectively create and reflect, objectifying our own understandings to connect with the wider social and political contexts in which our learning is taking place. The readiness to engage in interpretation is central, almost a precondition to knowledge. To use a metaphor central to arts-based encounters, resonant with our location here in Sibeliustalo, on the edge of Lake Vesajarvi, Finland … we venture into the forest of things to see what we might find there…