Ground
Works

This article describes community/university partnerships with ArtsAction Group’s work (AAG) situated in Kosovo, Western Sahara, and Sri Lanka and higher education partners in the US and UK. AAG is an international community-based arts collective (artsaction.org) that includes professional and student volunteer arts educators, art therapists, teaching artists, and educators. Our focus is with children and youth in conflict-affected environments impacted by trauma, violence, and/or efforts at cultural erasure. AAG centers arts and healing, to foster capabilities (Deneulin, 2009; Nussbaum, 2011; Maguire & McCallum, 2019) critical to functioning and healthy societies and to emphasize relationality (ethics and responsibility towards each other) and impact (self cultivation and responsibility together). AAG involves artful coalitions (Kay & Wolf, 2017) of people from different geographic, cultural, and social positioning. In this article, we share insights on the messiness of transnational, transdisciplinary collaborations. We discuss knowledge generated from experiences navigating the complexities existing in arts and cultural partnerships including the multiple egos, traditions, rules, bureaucracy, expectations, and roles that are entangled in the work– and impossible to avoid. We acknowledge these encounters as necessary pedagogic processes of learning, trust-building, letting go of control, teamwork, and community-building. We resist normative hierarchical community/university partnerships and practices that are ‘conflict averse.’ Staying with the trouble in solidarity forces one to work in unexpected collaborations and combinations which can spark creative solutions and new ways of approaching equitable, community-centered, research projects.

here-ing is an environmentally embedded artwork by Janine Antoni commissioned by the Spencer Museum's Arts Research Integration (ARI) program in collaboration with the University of Kansas Field Station and School of Architecture & Design. Working across architecture, art, audiology, and environmental science, this project offers embodied and culturally responsive practices, including place-based and artistic research methods, for reconstructing healthier native grasslands and understanding the ecological relationship between the environment and human body. here-ing is a three-acre labyrinth stretching across three former farm fields and designed in the shape of the anatomy of the human ear. The creation of here-ing was a multi-year process that began with a prescribed burn, plotting the design into the fields, and carving a large-scale finger labyrinth onto a native limestone boulder placed at the trailhead to orient visitors and increase accessibility. Visitor footsteps on the labyrinth trail create and maintain the path for those who come after them. If the path ceases to be walked, it will be reclaimed by the tallgrass prairie and only remain through story. Visitor participation in creating the piece ultimately demonstrates the nature of good land stewardship: a committed relationship to nature and place that bridges diverse cultures to better nurture the land. Since its inception in 2021, here-ing has continued to evolve through public participation, re-seeding, and ongoing workshops and education around collaborative Indigenous-led cultural burns to stimulate healthy native species regeneration.