Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No.3/Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 2018/2019 | Page 9

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
a set of conversational interactions or dialogues, which allow human beings to question
the story being narrated about them and the one that they might narrate themselves
(Singh 2009). His notion of a cultural voice arises from a form of knowledge in which
the subjects themselves produce their understandings of themselves to name their world
and their existence within it (Freire 2000/1970). Aronowitz (1993:18) notes that in a
dialogue “recovering the voice of the oppressed is the fundamental condition for human
emancipation.”
We reported on a PAR exercise in volume 3.1 last year centered on the Edinburgh festivals
in a multiauthored essay entitled “The Arts, Participation, and Global Interests.”
We addressed the following question: “Can participatory deliberations motivated by the
arts help us understand ourselves?”
Thirty-three Global Cultural Fellows appointed through the Institute for International
Cultural Relations (IICR) during 2017–18 explored “cultural interests and values.” Their
deliberations included a week of intensive activities during the world-famous Edinburgh
festivals in August 2017. The Fellows attended pre-selected events at the festivals, as well
as structured deliberations at the University of Edinburgh. Cultural conversations, rooted
in participatory research techniques, used to explore the creation, contestation and
choices around our cultural interests and values.
The 70 th anniversary of the birth of the festival city of Edinburgh in 1947 offered an important
opportunity to explore the cultural values that created one of the largest annual
cultural interactions in human history. The global values that informed the creation of
the festival resulted from the vision of a few individuals and were fostered through a
network of global and national institutions (Bartie 2013). Broadly, they reflected the Enlightenment
Project with an optimistic view of learning from human interactions. Seventy
years after the launch of the festivals, we ask ourselves how far we have come in
terms of tolerance, understanding, and respect, as well as in the spirit of universalism.
However, we chose to explore the theme through participatory dialogues rather than
monologic essays.
Filmmaker Guy Gotto produced several films on the participatory interactions among
the 33 fellows. The overview film from documentary filmmaker Guy Gotto below describes
the project and the reactions of the fellows to the seven subthemes we selected
to question global cultural interests and values. These were: highs and lows questioning
cultural tastes; voice and silence; role of witnessing in art; art and empathy; anger and
anxiety; culture wars; and the possibilities of art to speak to a global language.
Filmmaker Guy Gotto’s reflections, reprinted in the AIA essay referenced above, address
the challenges of bringing the unsettling use of a camera to record deliberations both in
terms of being the “gaze” but, importantly, also for being a participant in the room.
On the gaze, he notes:
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