Walk This Way: The role of the artist from creative placemaking to communitas

Abstract

For artists and arts organizations, creative placemaking can be a process to use their artistic creativity with and for their communities, while policymakers often view it as a strategy to foster social cohesion and economic revitalization through arts and culture. Researchers have tended to look at this process by highlighting either audience engagement or the role of the festivals and institutions involved. What has been lacking in the literature is a focus on the artists' voices on this process and case studies in towns and rural environments beyond cities. This article, written from the perspective of a practitioner, addresses these gaps and examines the contested values placed on a public-facing work in a small post-industrial town in northern England. I examine the process of creating and installing WALK THIS WAY, an outdoor light and music installation commissioned as part of a light festival. The project involved participatory dance workshops with local young people, whose movements were captured using a depth sensor and translated into visual and audio content for the installation. Reactions from the community ranged from enthusiasm to curiosity and indifference, prompting me to reflect on the purpose of public art in my own town. This article highlights the potential and some limitations of engaging communities in temporary cultural interventions. Among a socially fragmented town and a background of long-standing economic decline, I frame creating the work as 'communitas'–an act of contributing and belonging to a community. For philosopher Roberto Esposito, communitas requires gift-giving without the expectation of reciprocation. As an act of artistic communitas, the creation of WALK THIS WAY was intended to provide a shared experience, a gift to my own community without demanding acceptance or approval. While WALK THIS WAY demonstrated the potential for participatory art-making to spark community interactions, it also illustrated the messy process of creative placemaking.