Collective creative practices for transformation : an emerging field of practice

This booklet assembles all of the articles that we, the Plurality University Network team, published in 2022 within the ‘Collective Creative Practices for Transformation’ project, part of the Narratopias programme. It gives an overview of the work that we’ve accomplished: identifying and collecting projects from all around the world, meeting with practitioners, creating spaces for experimentations and discussions, identifying problems and questioning biases, and analyzing our own practice in light of the lessons learned. This booklet is a milestone towards the objective of framing a field of practice. Context Narratopias is a collaborative and open programme to organize, on a global scale, a collective response to the recurring call for ‘new narratives’. An invitation to embark on a search for alternative, transformative narratives as well as the practices that make them emerge, and turn them into the seeds of concrete changes. Within Narratopias, we created a collaborative library of Transformative Narratives, from all over the world, and open-source tools and games to invent, play with, and continue narratives. During the first year of Narratopias, we met with groups who concretely used narratives (in the broadest sense) as a base for transformation, and learned that how and by whom narratives are produced, used and discussed, matters as much as their content. We therefore decided in 2022 to focus on collective creative practices. The ‘Collective Creative Practices for Transformation’ project We define a collective creative practice as follows: A project led by individuals or organizations (artists, researchers, activists, public institutions, NGO’s..) who use artistic formats (fictional writing, theater, design fiction, etc.) with groups to open up the paths for transformations, by: