NOTE: Participants need to bring an object small and light enough to be held with one hand, which is not fragile. No music theory knowledge or music score reading skills are required.

OVERVIEW: Art has a long history as a form of political discourse and has been a medium for social action and change since the 1960s, with various practices and creative processes evolving at the time, such as Activist (or Protest) Art, Community Art and collaborative processes, and Socially Engaged Practice. The spatial aspect has been a subject of continuous research in these politically charged genres, concerning not only the performance space’s nature, physical environment and semiology but also the relationship between the artwork and the subject's own environment (e.g. Art commenting on rules applied in public spaces performed in those same public spaces). In this lecture, we will explore another connection point between space and artistic work, focusing on mixed-media compositions and sound installations. Created as spaces for micro-societies to evolve, those works reflect power relations and social action through conversations between participants, and collective decision-making. The main discussion will develop around the compositions

‘We Should Burn This!’ (2018) and ‘Click to the Dark Side, We Have Cookies’ (2022), which were used as apparatuses for leading participants to discuss, take decisions, and act, in order to investigate the potential for social action and change through the arts. We will also explore the role of physical space and place, group behaviour and discussion as part of the performance, and the potential application of the above-mentioned design in social psychology research, and education, as well as prospective methodologies for creating and researching these compositions/’spaces’. During the second part of the lecture/workshop, we will create short performances using objects and simple musical instruments applying the ‘composed space’ design to a subject which will be introduced for discussion at the beginning of the workshop (second hour). The purpose of this lecture/workshop is to encourage participants to create interdisciplinary connections between their profession and creative processes and raise questions about the potential application of those ideas in an educational framework.