Performing Integration: Participatory Art & New Publics in Malmö
This study explores the role of participatory art spaces in changing ideas of integration in Sweden. Examining two Malmö organizations dedicated to collaborative expressive practice in the context of an era of unprecedented migration – Konstkupan and Arabiska Kulturinstitut – the project deploys theories of art, performance, and cultural geography; and utilizes ethnomimetic research methods to address the following research questions: How do spaces dedicated to artistic collaboration contribute to changing popular notions and personal experiences of integration? Which artistic practices engender these changing dynamics? What sorts of new publics are generated by these practices and spaces? The study aims to place these organizations in relation to each other, to Malmö city, and to the Swedish state, in order to both track the state’s involvement in civil society integration projects, and to examine recent efforts to complicate that involvement at the level of collaborative practice and everyday life. Additionally, it adds to the extant literature on migration, urban studies, and expressive practice by including multiple, scaffolded perspectives: not only the perspectives of the state and people with migration experience, but also the perspectives of native Swedes living in Malmö.
Final report
Purpose of the Project
Shifting expectations of immigrants have been encoded in the Nordic welfare model. In the mid- to late-20th century, integration was gauged by immigrants’ achievement within institutional realms like employment, housing and education. Since the 1980s, immigrants to Scandinavia have increasingly contended with ideologies and policies of integration tied to conformity to social norms and cultural values. ‘Integration’ thus conceptually designates who belongs and who does not
in the realm of everyday life. Recent years have seen a flourishing of cultural organizations working to help immigrants navigate these less tangible imperatives. Yet such programs are also co-opted by the state to manage marginalized groups (Clavier & Kauppinen 2014) and are vulnerable to changes in government, which often result in funding cuts.
The aim of this study was to explore the role of participatory art spaces in changing ideas of integration in Sweden. It proposed focusing on two Malmö organizations, Konstkupan (KK) and Arabiska Kulturinstitutet (AK), to address the following research questions: How do spaces dedicated to artistic collaboration contribute to changing understandings of integration? Which artistic practices engender these changing dynamics? What sort of new publics do these practices and spaces generate?
My pilot study had examined how young asylum seekers and refugees living in Sweden and Denmark negotiated changing identities by performing self and community online and offline. A key finding of this ethnographic study was that these young people often feel they bear an unjust burden to prove they can assimilate. Living in a society that professes multiculturalism as an official ideology, they argue that native Swedes should also ‘integrate’ into the new order of things.
This project aimed to respond to this call by engaging the perspectives of people with migration experience and those of native Swedes. By situating KK and AK within a historical framework of similar cultural projects, and in Sweden’s political climate; engaging theories of art, performance and cultural geography; and utilizing ethnomimetic research methods, I aimed to understand how creative spaces and practices inform participants’ understanding of what it means to integrate in contemporary urban Sweden.
How the Project Was Implemented
Just before the project began, AK shut down due to financial pressures and the founder’s other commitments. As I had already been hanging out at KK for some time, I apportioned the days I would have been at AK to KK and continued making connections there and getting involved in the work of the organization. I attended meetings between KK and its partners and participated in arts workshops related to dance and graffiti.
During this time, KK had a change in leadership and moved its center to another space in the same neighborhood. Amid these changes, I continued started planning future collaborations with leadership and participants. In January 2020, we partnered with the Cultural Avenue Uganda to host a series of arts workshops about migration. The resulting output, Refugees Across Spaces: A Collaborative Performance was held in Malmö University’s Niagara building, in an open landing space. Locals with migration backgrounds, Ugandan artists, and project facilitators participated. Faculty, students, and artists joined as audience and participants in a talk-back session.
KK organizers and I – along with PhD student Hugo Boothby, whose research interests intersected with my own – developed a series of workshops centered on bringing new arrivals and autochthonous Swedes together to create a photographic exhibition and accompanying book, to re-map the city by creating map collages, and to produce memory walking tours. Just as we were ready to launch this Many Malmös series, the pandemic hit, and we had to rethink our strategy.
The resulting workshop series, Picturing Home, was the most unexpected but rewarding way for the project to unfold. Over five weeks, new arrivals, autochthonous Swedes, researchers, and guests from elsewhere gathered over Zoom to share our home spaces and talk about what home means. Each week, our group participated in a different activity, including sharing photographs of home, teaching skills used to make home, and playing music that sounds like home. Hugo and I recorded these three-hour sessions with participants’ permission, with the promise that we would share neither the videos nor the audio without consent.
Between sessions, participants had access to a shared Instagram account, where they could upload images, sounds, and collages related to workshop themes. We also used pieces of the audio to shape podcast episodes in collaboration with participants.
Hugo and I wrote general scripts and sent them out to each week’s collaborators so that they had input on story arcs. We recorded raw cuts over Zencastr so that we could speak remotely, and then edited the material afterward. The resulting podcast was broadcast on Soundcloud and iTunes, as an auditory piece of publicly accessible research, a challenge to academia’s often long timelines and prohibitive access costs.
The podcast and Instagram repository became research methods/texts in themselves. Participants expressed deep satisfaction with the connections forged through the process, while acknowledging some troubling aspects of the research project, including English as the lingua franca, and the inescapable fact that Hugo and I would be publishing on the project and thus building our CVs. In other words: there remain practical power inequalities in the work, no matter how collaborative it was.
Most Important Contributions
The unexpected turns in the research (especially its focus on podcasting) ended up in many ways being incredibly fruitful. One contribution of the project was thus its exploration of the community-building potential of podcast process rather than product. Many podcasts and the literature written about them focus on the listener communities that crop up around podcasts, or the communities on whom podcasts focus. By contrast, our podcast and writing about it centered on how communities form, often across communities, through recording and editing sound together. By theorizing the podcast as a ‘boundary object’ (Star & Griesemer 1989) Hugo and I explored how participants used the podcast to their own ends, and how its resultant ground-up narratives might challenge the ‘authoritative’ narratives circulated through podcasts, research, and state policy.
The practical and financial ease of archiving conversations and representations on social media also presents an alternative to academic timelines and paywalls limiting the timely and equitable dissemination of information. In contrast to less sustainable academic and civic projects, which operate on funding timelines and often close down completely after funding and/or public interest runs out, this project in some ways offered a more sustainable mode of connection, production, and dissemination.
Thirdly, I also theorized podcasting as a liminoid practice, where new connections happen through play and experimentation. Focusing on this space in between conception and culmination, we can sonically trace the nascent communities that collaborative podcast practice encourages. Foregoing neat research outcomes may challenge the ‘objectification’ that occurs in academic research’s striving for objectivity, and open space for ‘desire-based research’, which centers communities’ visions for their futures (Tuck 2009). We might also be privy to the two-way process of integrating, which is an ongoing negotiation and action rather than a goal or endpoint.
New Research Questions
The project revealed new inroads for future work. These include considering how to continue community collaboration, especially as KK’s funding ran out and thus the centering institution of the project faded away towards its end. Although many participants are still friends, I will be thinking against institutional models of community engagement and considering more mobile and sustainable practices of collaboration amongst people with migration backgrounds and autochthonous Europeans.
Further, the research highlighted an uncomfortable truth: Hugo and I both built our CVs and publications through this project. While participants enjoyed it, became close, and had their ideas of integration challenged, their participation also constituted unpaid, voluntary labor. Beyond the creative and alternative methodologies deployed by this project, including ethnomimesis (O’Neill & Hubbard 2010) and podcasting, how can we disrupt the power structures that still underpin academic research? I am currently working on this question with Keith Nyende of The Cultural Avenue, as we bring low-tech podcast strategy to refugee communities in Uganda.
International Dimension
The project has been rooted in fields currently developing in Swedish academia, including podcast studies, artistic research, and postmigration theory.
The project has seen international dissemination through conferences, including the annual International Communication Association conference (Paris, 2022), where a forthcoming book chapter won best faculty paper in the Activism, Communication, and Social Justice section. A journal article was also published in one of the major radio studies journals, in a special issue dedicated to up-and-coming researchers.
Work on the podcast was presented to the MeCCSA Radio Studies Network in the UK.
The project also resulted in ongoing collaboration with the Cultural Avenue, initially through a digital storytelling workshop, and soon via a podcast workshop.
Dissemination & Collaboration Outside Academia
As noted, the project has segued into collaboration with the Cultural Avenue. The research has also been presented at several conferences and through public lectures and participation on public panels. See list below.
Shifting expectations of immigrants have been encoded in the Nordic welfare model. In the mid- to late-20th century, integration was gauged by immigrants’ achievement within institutional realms like employment, housing and education. Since the 1980s, immigrants to Scandinavia have increasingly contended with ideologies and policies of integration tied to conformity to social norms and cultural values. ‘Integration’ thus conceptually designates who belongs and who does not
in the realm of everyday life. Recent years have seen a flourishing of cultural organizations working to help immigrants navigate these less tangible imperatives. Yet such programs are also co-opted by the state to manage marginalized groups (Clavier & Kauppinen 2014) and are vulnerable to changes in government, which often result in funding cuts.
The aim of this study was to explore the role of participatory art spaces in changing ideas of integration in Sweden. It proposed focusing on two Malmö organizations, Konstkupan (KK) and Arabiska Kulturinstitutet (AK), to address the following research questions: How do spaces dedicated to artistic collaboration contribute to changing understandings of integration? Which artistic practices engender these changing dynamics? What sort of new publics do these practices and spaces generate?
My pilot study had examined how young asylum seekers and refugees living in Sweden and Denmark negotiated changing identities by performing self and community online and offline. A key finding of this ethnographic study was that these young people often feel they bear an unjust burden to prove they can assimilate. Living in a society that professes multiculturalism as an official ideology, they argue that native Swedes should also ‘integrate’ into the new order of things.
This project aimed to respond to this call by engaging the perspectives of people with migration experience and those of native Swedes. By situating KK and AK within a historical framework of similar cultural projects, and in Sweden’s political climate; engaging theories of art, performance and cultural geography; and utilizing ethnomimetic research methods, I aimed to understand how creative spaces and practices inform participants’ understanding of what it means to integrate in contemporary urban Sweden.
How the Project Was Implemented
Just before the project began, AK shut down due to financial pressures and the founder’s other commitments. As I had already been hanging out at KK for some time, I apportioned the days I would have been at AK to KK and continued making connections there and getting involved in the work of the organization. I attended meetings between KK and its partners and participated in arts workshops related to dance and graffiti.
During this time, KK had a change in leadership and moved its center to another space in the same neighborhood. Amid these changes, I continued started planning future collaborations with leadership and participants. In January 2020, we partnered with the Cultural Avenue Uganda to host a series of arts workshops about migration. The resulting output, Refugees Across Spaces: A Collaborative Performance was held in Malmö University’s Niagara building, in an open landing space. Locals with migration backgrounds, Ugandan artists, and project facilitators participated. Faculty, students, and artists joined as audience and participants in a talk-back session.
KK organizers and I – along with PhD student Hugo Boothby, whose research interests intersected with my own – developed a series of workshops centered on bringing new arrivals and autochthonous Swedes together to create a photographic exhibition and accompanying book, to re-map the city by creating map collages, and to produce memory walking tours. Just as we were ready to launch this Many Malmös series, the pandemic hit, and we had to rethink our strategy.
The resulting workshop series, Picturing Home, was the most unexpected but rewarding way for the project to unfold. Over five weeks, new arrivals, autochthonous Swedes, researchers, and guests from elsewhere gathered over Zoom to share our home spaces and talk about what home means. Each week, our group participated in a different activity, including sharing photographs of home, teaching skills used to make home, and playing music that sounds like home. Hugo and I recorded these three-hour sessions with participants’ permission, with the promise that we would share neither the videos nor the audio without consent.
Between sessions, participants had access to a shared Instagram account, where they could upload images, sounds, and collages related to workshop themes. We also used pieces of the audio to shape podcast episodes in collaboration with participants.
Hugo and I wrote general scripts and sent them out to each week’s collaborators so that they had input on story arcs. We recorded raw cuts over Zencastr so that we could speak remotely, and then edited the material afterward. The resulting podcast was broadcast on Soundcloud and iTunes, as an auditory piece of publicly accessible research, a challenge to academia’s often long timelines and prohibitive access costs.
The podcast and Instagram repository became research methods/texts in themselves. Participants expressed deep satisfaction with the connections forged through the process, while acknowledging some troubling aspects of the research project, including English as the lingua franca, and the inescapable fact that Hugo and I would be publishing on the project and thus building our CVs. In other words: there remain practical power inequalities in the work, no matter how collaborative it was.
Most Important Contributions
The unexpected turns in the research (especially its focus on podcasting) ended up in many ways being incredibly fruitful. One contribution of the project was thus its exploration of the community-building potential of podcast process rather than product. Many podcasts and the literature written about them focus on the listener communities that crop up around podcasts, or the communities on whom podcasts focus. By contrast, our podcast and writing about it centered on how communities form, often across communities, through recording and editing sound together. By theorizing the podcast as a ‘boundary object’ (Star & Griesemer 1989) Hugo and I explored how participants used the podcast to their own ends, and how its resultant ground-up narratives might challenge the ‘authoritative’ narratives circulated through podcasts, research, and state policy.
The practical and financial ease of archiving conversations and representations on social media also presents an alternative to academic timelines and paywalls limiting the timely and equitable dissemination of information. In contrast to less sustainable academic and civic projects, which operate on funding timelines and often close down completely after funding and/or public interest runs out, this project in some ways offered a more sustainable mode of connection, production, and dissemination.
Thirdly, I also theorized podcasting as a liminoid practice, where new connections happen through play and experimentation. Focusing on this space in between conception and culmination, we can sonically trace the nascent communities that collaborative podcast practice encourages. Foregoing neat research outcomes may challenge the ‘objectification’ that occurs in academic research’s striving for objectivity, and open space for ‘desire-based research’, which centers communities’ visions for their futures (Tuck 2009). We might also be privy to the two-way process of integrating, which is an ongoing negotiation and action rather than a goal or endpoint.
New Research Questions
The project revealed new inroads for future work. These include considering how to continue community collaboration, especially as KK’s funding ran out and thus the centering institution of the project faded away towards its end. Although many participants are still friends, I will be thinking against institutional models of community engagement and considering more mobile and sustainable practices of collaboration amongst people with migration backgrounds and autochthonous Europeans.
Further, the research highlighted an uncomfortable truth: Hugo and I both built our CVs and publications through this project. While participants enjoyed it, became close, and had their ideas of integration challenged, their participation also constituted unpaid, voluntary labor. Beyond the creative and alternative methodologies deployed by this project, including ethnomimesis (O’Neill & Hubbard 2010) and podcasting, how can we disrupt the power structures that still underpin academic research? I am currently working on this question with Keith Nyende of The Cultural Avenue, as we bring low-tech podcast strategy to refugee communities in Uganda.
International Dimension
The project has been rooted in fields currently developing in Swedish academia, including podcast studies, artistic research, and postmigration theory.
The project has seen international dissemination through conferences, including the annual International Communication Association conference (Paris, 2022), where a forthcoming book chapter won best faculty paper in the Activism, Communication, and Social Justice section. A journal article was also published in one of the major radio studies journals, in a special issue dedicated to up-and-coming researchers.
Work on the podcast was presented to the MeCCSA Radio Studies Network in the UK.
The project also resulted in ongoing collaboration with the Cultural Avenue, initially through a digital storytelling workshop, and soon via a podcast workshop.
Dissemination & Collaboration Outside Academia
As noted, the project has segued into collaboration with the Cultural Avenue. The research has also been presented at several conferences and through public lectures and participation on public panels. See list below.