16th SAR Conference Porto 2025
SIG 8: Facilitating as Creative Practice
The organizers of SIG 8: Facilitating share a realization that facilitating asserted itself at a central position in our practices, even before we recognized and named it. There is a rising need to grasp facilitating in the arts methodologically, through its emergent techniques and as a way of knowing. We are interested in locating facilitating as an instigator of social and institutional imagination by thinking facilitating in conjunction with ethics and agency, and also with vulnerability, joy and communitas.
As part of the SAR conference, Special Interest Groups have an opportunity to frame intentions for the alternating SAR Forum format that centers the work of SIGs, while also inviting members to share their projects. The four projects shared in person at the 16th SAR conference in Porto include an activation of new work using objects with markable surfaces, by Kevin Boardman; a presentation of facilitation projects designed to bring people together who might not otherwise meet, including a current project fostering dialogue between refugees, military personnel, and local long-term residents impacted by migration and border policies, by Carolyn Defrin; a discussion of arts-based projects in response to experiencing domestic violence, by Shasha Mi; and an exploration of facilitating as part of curatorial practices, by Lavinia Cazacu. Additional projects will be added to an online repository. We are looking forward to spending part of the morning with each other. The convening is open to all conference attendees, who may also join into all activations and contribute to the concluding visioning exercise.
Organized by Adelheid Mers, Marija Griniuk, and Fabrício Fava
Schedule
11:00 - 11:10 Welcome and Introduction
11:10 - 11:35 Kevin Boardman: Wearable, mobile whiteboards. An activation.
11:40 - 12:00 Carolyn Defrin: Gentle rule breaking: Creative invitations for disrupting disconnect
12:00 - 12:15 Shasha Mi: Opportunities and Challenges in Facilitating an Arts-Based Project Co-Created with Domestic Violence Survivors
12:15 - 12:30 Lavinia Cazacu: Curating Artistic Research: Strategies for Mediation
12:30 - 1:00 2026 SAR Forum Vision Session
ONLINE Repository in progress
Kevin Boardman is an artist, educator, and researcher. He specializes in drawing, sculpture, and arts pedagogy and holds an MA by Research from Manchester School of Art, UK. His work focuses on creating reusable 3D surfaces that facilitate radical thought and action. Kevin's artistic interests are centred around exploring alternative modes of thinking and reimagining spaces, objects, and situations.
Website: kevinboardman.com
Email: kevinboardman@outlook.com
Gentle rule breaking: Creative invitations for disrupting disconnect
In this presentation, I share how gentle rule-breaking—through humour, kindness, and unexpected questions—can create space for connection, subversion, and intimacy across divides. Defining rule-breaking in this context as a disruption of social-relationships that have been constructed by society, namely to keep certain groups apart or perceived as apart, I will draw on three recent facilitation projects designed to bring people together who might not otherwise meet. From the curation of “mystery envelopes” inviting funders to reflect on personal relationships to art in addition to the relationships they imagined for those they fund, to kissing dinners—where strangers share meals and kissing stories—to a current project fostering dialogue between refugees, military personnel, and local long-term residents impacted by migration and border policies, I will discuss how creativity and care can open unexpected pathways to empathy.
Informed by a spectrum of facilitation practices from Augusto Boal’s 'joker' to Priya Parker’s 'gatherer', I will also note complexities regarding the art of balancing how people can feel taken care of and feel willing to take risks. And how the facilitation of artistic practice in particular can shift power dynamics through an entanglement of circumstantial and creative vulnerabilities.
Carolyn Defrin is an artist, researcher and facilitator working across video, performance and installation. Based between Europe and the UK, her socially engaged, interdisciplinary practice explores migration, identity and belonging. She is a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Graz and co-founder of the multimedia Kissing Project.
Email: cdefrin@gmail.com/carolyn.defrin@uni-graz.at
Website: carolyndefrin.com
Opportunities and Challenges in Facilitating an Arts-Based Project Co-Created with Domestic Violence Survivors
This presentation introduces an arts-based project titled “We Are Tormented by ‘Love’”, co-created with women from a self-help group to address domestic violence in Fukuoka, Japan. Through collage workshops and material exploration, participants created artworks, including novels, installations, and drawings, accompanied by personal narratives, and later exhibited publicly. The project is grounded in participants’ traumatic experiences and aims to invite a broader community to witness their stories. Given the limited guidance on facilitating arts-based projects on sensitive topics, this study explores the challenges and opportunities of facilitation in this project.
The study reflected online messages, field notes, interviews with two participants, open-ended responses to questionnaires from audience members, and responses from three facilitators. Findings highlight that online discussions and spatial layout helped participants feel emotionally supported. Meanwhile, the shift from structured meetings to open artistic expression deepened connections within self-help group participants, but also led to interpersonal boundary challenges. Additionally, facilitators and participants alike hesitated to voice negative emotions and individual needs. Furthermore, audience focus on artistic quality sometimes overshadowed the project’s goal of facilitating the witnessing survivors' stories, affecting all participants' experiences.
Shasha Mi is a PhD researcher at Kyushu University in Japan, currently undertaking a one-year exchange program at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She explores arts-based methods that engage workshp participants in creating and others in witnessing "scar stories" in different contexts. Her research focuses on themes of storytelling, witnessing, co-creation, and facilitation.
Email: mi.shasha.303@s.kyushu-u.ac.jp/mishasha916@hotmail.com
Curating Artistic Research: Strategies for Mediation
The evolution of artistic research has introduced a shift in curatorial practices, moving beyond traditional exhibition-making towards facilitation, collaboration, and institutional strategy. This transformation of curatorial practices within artistic research has redefined the role of the curator from a mediator of exhibition-making to an active facilitator in the research process. This presentation explores the role of curating in the early stages of artistic research projects, emphasizing how curatorial methodologies act as mediators between artists, scientists, and institutions. By focusing on the epistemological impact of curatorial strategies, my presentation examines how curators shape research trajectories, enabling knowledge production across disciplines. Drawing from case studies and ongoing research, this presentation proposes a re-evaluation of curatorial roles as facilitators of interdisciplinary artistic inquiry. By integrating insights from intersectionality, institutional critique, and knowledge transfer theories, this discussion highlights the necessity for curatorial adaptability in fostering research-driven artistic projects. By additionally introducing an Artists' Perspectives Survey this presentation attempts to capture how artists perceive the role of curators as facilitators in artistic research by analyzing responses from artists engaged in interdisciplinary projects, highlighting their expectations, experiences, and challenges in working with curators. The aim is to bridge the gap between theoretical discourse and applied methodologies, fostering a community-driven exchange of knowledge that informs future curatorial practices.
Lavinia Cazacu works across the realms of art, curation, and theory, drawing on a background in art history and business in assuming various professional roles and situating herself between domains. Cazacu is interested in intersections, traversing infrastructures, disciplines, and domains. In her curatorial work the artistic, socio-cultural, and political realms always intertwine.