Arts-based Social Interventions: First Results of the AMASS Testbed

The European Commission H2020-funded project Acting on the Margin: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS) brings together artists and communities to explore how the arts can act as a vehicle for mitigating societal challenges. The project spans the margins of Europe, from Malta, Portugal, Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary, the UK, Sweden and Finland. Implemented between 2020 and 2023, AMASS is an arts-based action research project that aims to create concrete opportunities for people to come together and accompany artists as agents in creative projects and interpretations.

This multidisciplinary project considers a wide field of disciplines. Through participatory approaches, it uses practical methods to capture, assess and harness the impact of the arts and further generate social impact through policy recommendations. A European-wide AMASS Testbed of 35 experiments is implemented, and the research outcomes and findings will be upscaled through policy recommendations. The testbed identifies, explores, collates, evaluates and analyses existing and new innovative productions, experiments, and case studies from the perspective and the physical positioning of European countries ‘on the margins’ in the underserved northern, southern, western, and eastern regions.

The first AMASS Symposium was implemented on 28 and 28 May, 2021. This activity was led by AMASS Research Fellow Professor Andrea Kárpáti from the Corvinus University of Budapest. At the two-day symposium, the project partners presented the first research reports of the seven pilot studies that were implemented as part of the testbed. The reports addressed the pilot studies and their implementation. In addition, the assessment of the pilots and policy implications were presented. Up to sixty audience members participated in the symposium.

This publication presents the proceedings of the symposium, which are research reports that partly fulfill the Deliverable 2.4 Research reports as journal publications of the project. The fourteen research reports from the participating countries illustrate a wide variety of artistic projects of socially engaged arts and their assessment methods. Some initial reflections on policy implications deriving from the assessment are also presented. The assessment enabled new insights into the impact of the arts in societies, through the communities with whom the AMASS partners were co-creating new and shared experiences. All reports were double peer-reviewed and edited by Andrea Kárpáti and Melanie Sarantou. The reports are organised according to the countries in which they were implemented. The order of the reports is not intended to set up ‘margins’ between the countries. On the contrary, and as the reports illustrate, there are strong similarities and comparable case studies that strikingly remind us of the complexities of margins, and that they are persistently present across Europe and its societies.