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30 September 2026
This timely gathering brings together artists, activists, policymakers, human rights researchers and social change actors to examine the urgency of socially engaged art and community practice – to consider how these intersecting fields can bear witness during increasingly turbulent times
The programme will begin with a keynote address, followed by a panel discussion in addition to live case studies, collective reflection, and opportunities for networking.
Image credit: MAC
Áine O'Brien, Elaine Forde , 10 September 2026
The Learning Lab Incubator was structured as a pilot programme of 5 in situ sessions in addition to online conversations (see below for the full timetable). We commissioned the artist, Kate O’Shea, to critically document in the form of a living archive the collective and collaborative research process.
Several frameworks and questions initially guide this programme:
Keywords: Reconciliation, Commemoration, Power, Relationality, Community, Neighbourhood, Post-Conflict, Trauma, Ecosystem, Extraction, Place, Reparation, Public, Scale, Regeneration, Transitional Justice, Restorative Justice, Grief, Memory, Legacy, Narrative, Reimagine, Storytelling, Reciprocity, Healing, Heritage, Responsibility, Truth-Telling, Memory, Forgetting, Repair, Mediation, Regeneration, Rights, History. Loss, Home, Archive.
Image credit: Kate O'Shea
Beyond the Now: Socially Engaged Art in a (Dis)Connected World (2022-2023) was launched at the tail-end of Create Syria (2015-2023), comprising a partnership between Ettijahat in Beirut and Counterpoints Arts in London with the University of the Arts Plymouth, and the Mozilla Festival (alongside other Beyond the Now partners*). Supported by a British Council International Collaboration Grant.
‘Create Syria is a programme (2015-2023) dedicated to enhancing artists’ capabilities to contribute to the development of more resilient and unified communities. It achieves this by facilitating community art projects that prioritize experiential depth and artistic excellence’.
Create Syria: A Space to Explore Arts and Social Change. Questions Around Social Arts Practices in a (Dis)Connected World (2026)
Image credit: Ettijahat Independent Culture
One early encounter with Kate O’Shea’s art practice literally took the form of a ‘stepping into’, when she transformed a room at the 2023 Summer School on Collaborative Practice and Social Change into a multi-layered, many-peopled archive.
Prints, books, zines, posters, fabrics and other memorabilia filled the school space with a sense of calculated chaos. From that moment, I understood O’Shea’s practice as spanning and circling a full 360-degrees. Her work resembling a ‘living archive’ in the way Stuart Hall first coined the term when reflecting on the challenges of documenting the Black and Asian artist diaspora:
Kate O’Shea’s exhibition, Mycelium, runs from 20 May – 26 August 2026 at Visual, County Carlow – Ireland.
The School’s 6-day programme draws upon themes outlined in the public callout in addition to the challenges highlighted in in-person interviews.
Using international case studies and in-situ projects, the school explores the visible and invisible forms of labour and the distinct, yet interconnected skills and spheres involved in socially engaged work.
Summer School Areas of Inquiry:
Agnes Czajka and Áine O’Brien, 20 April 2022
Art, Migration and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship Edited by Agnes Czajka and Áine O’Brien Contemporary Europe – ridden by social, political and economic crises, overlaid onto colonial and imperial trajectories, and shaken by the shockwaves generated by Brexit and wide scale human displacement – has become a space in which citizenship and belonging are contested, disrupted, performed and produced anew.
Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenshipexplores the contribution of migrant and refugee artists to the performance and production of radical democratic citizenship in Europe. It foregrounds the insights of artists and cultural actors with diverse experiences of migration and displacement to fractious public debates about citizenship and belonging. It explores how migrant and refugee artists have audaciously inserted themselves into, and are pushing the boundaries of these debates, challenging and unhinging dominant interpretations of the parameters of European citizenship and belonging.
Part I of this edited volume is comprised of a series of short provocations by artists spanning and intermixing a range of art forms and methodologies including live art, visual art and public installation, community and site-specific durational work, or the combination of writing, auto-ethnography and media activism. The second Part comprises longer, more sustained engagements by visual and live art practitioners, dramaturges, curators and academics. These chapters focus on performative, participatory, auto-biographical and auto-ethnographic artistic processes and practices.
Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship highlights the critical interventions by artists who have experienced firsthand the everyday realities of displacement, focusing on how their diverse practices offer incisive challenges to existing regimes of citizenship and democracy.
Published by Rowman International – Frontiers of the Political Series, 2022
Image credit: Chloe Batch
Summer School team and invited participants , 10 April 2023
The Summer School was established five years ago. Beginning in 2018 in Carlingford near the Cooley Peninsula, it moved west to Killary Harbour in 2019. Out of necessity, it migrated online during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, returning to Killary in 2022. In many ways, the School has travelled through a tumultuous period, during which time the impact of the pandemic took its heaviest toll on local communities everywhere.
Since its launch, the Summer School programme has included a rich list of practitioners: from Khaled Barakeh and Mary Ann DeVlieg, together with Isabel Lima, Caroline Bergvall, Abdullah AlKafri, Juan delGado, Dana Olărescu, Ismail Einashe, Kit Braybrooke, Dominik Czechowski, Nike Jonah, Natalia Palombo, Sarah Allen, and the Haven for Artists Collective.
In many ways, the School operates as a creative crossroads, with the focus pivoting around facilitators’ areas of production, research and organisational preoccupations – resulting in a mixed bag of conversations with participating artists contributing through the lens of their practice, while, at the same time, encouraged to question the boundaries of that very practice.
Beyond the Now Collective, 5 October 2023
Curated and produced by the Beyond the Now collective (in the context of Re-framing Migrants in the European Media), the Collaborative Incubator Toolkit is the result of a long-form conversation in which journalists, digital activists and socially-engaged artists draw on their own experiences of migration and forced displacement to inform their criticisms of the way migration is represented by legacy media.
Curated and produced by the Beyond the Now collective (in the context of Re-framing Migrants in the European Media), the Collaborative Incubator Toolkit is the result of a long-form conversation in which journalists, digital activists and socially-engaged artists draw on their own experiences of migration and forced displacement to inform their criticisms of the way migration is represented by legacy media.
Image credit: Isabel Lima
Over five days, participants in the Summer School learned and unlearned together through a mix of cooperative activities – working alongside each other to share practices, methods, challenges and ideas and dreams for new projects.
In its sixth, the Summer School takes place in a world increasingly shaped by displacement and uncertainty. Tumultuous times, to be sure, but with seeds of hope, resistance and imagination, evident in your diverse yet interconnected practices. From the interdisciplinary visual arts to music and Hip Hop, live performance, film, photography, design and dramaturgy, you all bring to the School a timely mix of collaborative and socially engaged practice, blending art with civic activism and community engagement.
The 2023 Summer School’s special focus is on collaboration between artists and investigative journalists, with the aim of integrating the place-based skills of socially engaged arts practice with the forensic, storytelling skills of journalism.
Visiting international facilitators in 2023 include: Ismael Einashe (investigative journalist), Abdullah Alkafri (dramaturge) and Dana Olarescu (artist and designer in social practice).
13 July 2022
The 2022 Summer School programme lays out a a five-day residency enabling a ‘think and do’ collaborative approach.
Over five days (13-17 July), artists gathered for the Summer School on Cultural Diversity and Collaborative Practice in Leenane, Connemara, Co Galway, Ireland.
We were finally back in place after 2 years of being online – with contributions from Haven for Artists, Beirut; in addition to Mozilla Fest, Amsterdam and London; Deveron Projects, Aberdeenshire, Scotland; Ismail Einashe speaking from Nairobi, Kenya; and Kit Braybrooke from Berlin and much more.
The 2022 Summer School programme lays out a a five-day residency enabling a ‘think and do’ collaborative approach, utilising a combination of creative workshops, critical and comparative case studies, a creative group challenge, one-to-one mentoring, together with international guest artists including curators, policymakers and activists. In addition to an extensive reading list for research beyond the school.
Image credit: Leenane, Killary, Co Galway - Ireland
