
Ground Works is a platform for exemplary arts-inclusive research projects and reflection on the processes that drive interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Creating Knowledge in Common
Editors: Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire
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Ground Works Releases Second Special Edition: Creating Knowledge in Common
November 14, 2024
Ground Works is excited to launch its latest special edition, Creating Knowledge in Common, featuring academic community/partnerships that center the arts and design. The projects in this colle...
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Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Supporting Urban Amazonian Floodplain Communities Through Data and Art
In the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, Indigenous communities have been living in river floodplains for millennia and have developed unique cultural connections with the living waters and their rich biodiversity. To escape hardship (e.g. over extraction of resources, slavery, climate change impacts etc.), or seek opportunities (e.g. health, education, economic etc.), hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people have migrated from the jungle to Amazonian cities such as Iquitos over the past hundred years. Referencing traditional lifestyles, many of these migrants created floating and stilted communities in the city’s floodplain edges. Their multi-generational knowledge of floodplain agriculture, amphibious housing, and deeply-rooted community structures provides cultural, economic, and ecosystem services to the whole city. However, this mass migration also created challenges in housing, infrastructure and public services for the whole city. The Iquitos regional government has responded by enacting mandatory relocation for these residents to new highland developments far from the river, threatening their unique riverine cultures and deforesting a rare white sand rainforest ecosystem. In this visual narrative, we describe a blended arts and sciences project, Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Life Within Peru’s Urban Amazonian Floodplains, in which a highly collaborative team of 24 Peruvian and U.S. researchers and artists worked closely with 136 residents across three communities to showcase their life, health, and environmental connections, promoting traditional cultures and better-informed city planning that includes Indigenous Amazonian voices. We describe our interdisciplinary arts and sciences mixed-methods approach which included a public health survey, documentary photography, community drawings, and biodiversity/environmental measures that incorporated a community training program and local/traditional-scientific knowledge exchange workshop. Lastly, we discuss the value we found in pairing data with artistic storytelling, engaging diverse disciplines and academic-community partnerships, and uplifting underserved communities via an art and data exhibition.
Apothecarts: Mobilizing Abolition
How can design start a conversation and serve as a tool for advocacy and education? A team of artists, abolitionists, and architecture students combined efforts to answer this question through the design and fabrication of several mobile apothecaries, or “Apothecarts” for short. The Apothecarts challenge us to imagine a landscape without prisons by facilitating space for knowledge exchange and healing rooted in plant medicines grown at Solitary Gardens (the partnering non-profit). There are 2.2 million incarcerated people in the United States, and of those, around 90,000 are subjected to indefinite solitary confinement every day. The Apothecarts transform plants from Solitary Gardens into herbal teas and tinctures for communities most deeply impacted by the insidious reach of mass incarceration. This work is part of an ongoing effort at Tulane’s Small Center to expand design access, improve the design process, provide a design/build education and prepare a new generation of architects to create a more just world. Small Center is Tulane School of Architecture’s Community Design Center which includes design/build projects where students learn through making. This design/build process is an interdisciplinary collaboration that begins with interviews, area expert teach-ins, observation, and surveys as part of the project design phase. Students co-create design options that are presented to a core group of stakeholders. After a multi-stage feedback loop, students deliver a final built project, or in this case two small built projects. Since their debut in 2021, the carts have been part of multiple fairs, festivals, and events in their home city, and have sparked a conversation beyond New Orleans through inclusion in venues such as MOMA’s PS1 and in global design awards.
Cultural Engagements in Nutrition, Arts and Sciences (CENAS)
Featured Commentaries
Author commentary on Choreografish: an arts-based, virtual reality, anxiety intervention for autism
Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research
Becoming Desirably Strange: A Dialogue between Aaron Knochel and Roger Malina
Aaron D. Knochel and Roger Malina
This dialogue developed over several months between guest editor Aaron Knochel and Leonardo Executive Editor Roger Malina regarding the special collection Vibrant Ecologies of Research. Key publications and projects are jumping-off points for this wide-ranging discussion.
August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0010 · CC-BY-NC
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