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The use of the arts in deepening our inquiry-practice by Miren Larrea

Miren Larrea highlights the use of the arts as a way to deepen action researching. Miren led the first pre-gathering meeting, inviting us all to explore how the arts can help us go a bit deeper into understanding and transforming the ‘stuck’ relational aspects of our work. 

Have a look at the video Miren created (with her daughter’s help!).

 Miren’s practice provides an example of how she and her team are continuing to explore the links between AR+ and the book she’s just published on territorial development, called “Roots and Wings of action research for territorial development. Connecting local transformation and International collaborative learning.” By the way, it’s an open access book and this AR+ page gives more information about the chapters as well as a link to get a copy.  Enjoy!

How then do we use the arts to deepen our inquiry-practice? This is also one of the themes that we’ll take from the preGathering sessions into the Gathering itself.

Miren explains: “AR+ offers a different experience to each participant. However, it is also a shared space where our different experiences intertwine.

In the 2018 gathering in Chalmers, my team at Orkestra Foundation invited all participants to join us in a collaborative book writing process. Many of you did. By sharing the book, we also again open a new invitation for all of you to read and join us in our efforts to create, in our territories, collaborative spaces that link self-development with the urgent transformations our planet needs.

I can share my endeavours with art as a vehicle to connect with the deeper emotions at work in my work. 

In reflection on what had transpired in co-writing about our territorial development processes, (with Hilary and Xabier Barandiaran), I found myself feeling a bit stuck. There was something more to be looked at, but it wasn’t clear what. A song was humming in my head. My daughter helped me make a video connecting the song, the stuckness and my work.

This was not an easy task for me to look deeper using the arts. As an action researcher I too am socialized to academic rationality. Usually I turn the camera on others, on the politicians, on the territorial actors. In other words I turn it away from myself. Moreover in my mind the learning process is more or less over once a book or paper is on its way to publication. However, clearly something different was happening now. I found myself further (re-)ordering my thoughts about this experience when invited to lead the pre-Gathering!  

It’s now two years after we started our book. We have brought more of a power and emotions lens to uncovering dynamics around conflict in the work. This has made conflict, which is normal, also productive. And for me too, there were new discoveries in working with this. I discovered emotions I was unaware of with regard to the power symmetry that I experience as an action researcher, as a facilitator, as a woman. And I experienced the pre-gathering meeting as one more step in an unfinished developmental learning process. And so it becomes an invitation to invite others too! To look at their work, and what was unfinished in that work. And to use the arts to support deeper and next levels of inquiry. We each do it differently, as we shared in breakouts in the preGathering session.

What I have found in AR+ is a process that deepens the learning by keeping it alive and evolving in unexpected – next – directions. The pre-gathering meeting was an example of how participants in AR+ gently push each other forward in this path of self- and mutual development.

Hilary writes: I got to know Miren when she first published about conflict as a learning opportunity in action research. Aha, I thought, we need more of that. Not conflict per se, (we have too much of that!) but turning toward it as a productive opportunity to learn together.  And indeed not just conflict but any so called difficulty. For it to be productive, we’d allow the conflict to teach us by bringing more inquiry; and from that, inquiry there can be more light. For this special kind of inquiry, Miren has brought the arts in a most touching way, proposing a simple process of 1) noting when we’re stuck, 2) turning to some art form (drawing, poetry, movement) and  3) feeling our way to what needs to be known. We did a practice together with that to get a taste. We can do this at home too! We heard that we all have different preferences, some for using the iChing, some for drawing, some for collage of images, some for poetry and haiku … All of these artistic genres can liberate us – and our inquiries – to a next phase of deeper understanding. And we can help one another with that as we stretch.

This type of work with the arts is really timely, prescient even. It was first brought to AR+ through Catherine Etmanski who designed a new coLAB to intertwine creativity and mindfulness in action researching. Jean Hartmann later brought the practice of visual sculpting to this. Today use of the arts is helping open the stranglehold of 300 years of academic positivism.

Miren will be part of the AR+ Gathering, so let’s make space for being artistic – which is surely part of the ARTists repertoire.