Political Biographies

Application summary

The research project aims to document, contextualise and analyse political art practices in Finland, Estonia and Lithuania. The research will consist of interviews with ca 30 art practitioners who are active in movement politics and social justice initiatives. The result of the research project will be a collection of conversations that connect personal narratives with larger political histories. The research will make interventions into the dominant discourse of art history which tends to treat 'art' and 'activism' as distinct categories. The research will make manifest a variety of entanglements between art and politics, demonstrating how these realms often overlap and sometimes cannot meaningfully be separated at all. Rather than producing a linear and homogenous narrative, the research aims to make room for a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. From the juxtaposition of collected interviews, both commonalities and differences will emerge: key events can be recognised through frequent mentioning, affinities between artistic biographies and activist initiatives will become visible, reflections, critique and disputes will be articulated, potentially from contradicting perspectives. While connecting individual biographies with larger political histories, the interviews will also address affective dimensions of political everyday practices: how does activism affect artistic and personal biographies? What are the joys and challenges of collective work? How are activists supporting and caring for each other? How do they deal with issues of work overload, burn-out, depression? The research project will be carried out with the biographical method. This includes in-depth interviews in which the project participants are asked to reflect on their political biographies. The outcome of the research project will be a collection of texts which will be published throughout the research process and as a printed publication in 2023.