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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

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:

• What does reconciliation mean?
• How does reparation and transitional justice work in practice?
• How can SEA methods, which are relational by nature, document and amplify the complex histories of communities?
• How can SEA projects collaboratively foster civic and social infrastructure in communities facing displacement, housing issues, or post-conflict challenges?
• What role does the socially engaged artist play in this process?
• What might a cross-border collaboration in the form of a public art commission look like and feel?

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

‘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

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.

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:

• The various forms of ‘value’ associated with collaborative and socially engaged practice.
• Managing expectations with commissioners, funders, and community partners.
• Re-examining the commissioning process, providing time for preliminary research before co-production.
• Building trust with ‘critical friends’ and ‘champions’ in long-term projects.
• Navigating the relationship between craft, care, and the essential role of aesthetics in collaborative and socially engaged projects.
• Addressing the challenges of co-creating material and cultural infrastructures within contested public spaces.
• Balancing artistic authorship with the collaborative dynamics of working with communities and collectives.
• Documenting and ‘finding the story’ of a project in partnership with diverse allies and communities.
• Identifying and establishing both temporary and permanent venues for exhibiting collaborative and socially engaged work, including galleries, public museums and private and public collections, archives and other civic and community spaces.
• Exploring innovative approaches to critical evaluation with potential commissioners, collaborators, and participants.

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

Image credit: Isabel Lima

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).

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

Image credit: Isabel Lima, 2022

We are delighted to announce the publication of the programme for the 2021 Autumn School on Cultural Diversity and Collaborative Practice.

Now in its fourth year, the 2021 School will take the form of a five-day virtual residency enabling a ‘think and do’ collaborative approach, utilizing creative workshops, critical and comparative case studies, a creative group challenge, one-to-one mentoring.

International guest artists including curators, policymakers and activists: Dana Olărescu, Dominik Czechowski, Ismail Einashe, Isabel Lima, Nike Jonah.

A special feature in 2021 will include a School event with investigative journalist, Ismail Einashe, at Platforma 6 on 22^nd October.

The 2021 School on Cultural Diversity and Collaborative Practice is an initiative of Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts (Ireland) and Counterpoints Arts’ Learning Lab (UK); it is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland’s Artist in the Community (AIC) Scheme.

For Counterpoints Arts, conversations about art, migration, equality and the right to have rights are best navigated with people who straddle comparative locations and identities – where both learning and unlearning is performed through a crossing of personal, organisational, practice-based and geographical borders.

Cross-border conversations play an integral part of Counterpoints Arts’ mission as a learning organisation, facilitating horizontal spaces in which to share both challenges and successes of respective work and projects.

The delivery of this event with Create (Ireland) involved deep listening and reciprocal exchange, echoing the ethos and intersectional pedagogy of the Counterpoints Arts’ Learning Lab. Enabling both organisations (in Dublin and London) and participants (virtually all over the globe) to cast a collective inquiry about cultural rights and what we might mean by democratic ‘participation’ in the arts.

We hope that you enjoy this Learning Lab publication, illustrated throughout by the rich  breadth of case studies and grassroots interventions alongside perspectives honed from flagship art institutions. Or evident in the examples of experimental initiatives stretching collaborative process and practice together with the challenging of art and social justice policy via unique and dynamic provocations.

Image credit: Her City, Centre for the Less Good Idea. Photo: Zivanai Matangai