This Arts Council funded R & D project aims to explore how to represent socially engaged art projects so that the residue or legacy of a project can be better understood and made visible. Through a series of creative conversations with a range of artistic and written outcomes we hope to describe, interrogate and analyse the legacy of socially engaged art practice, in forms that prioritise the artists and participant’s voice. Acts of Transfer takes its title from a text by Diana Taylor which explores different forms of the archive, and how stories are transferred through performance. In this project we plan to take each artist back to the space of one of their projects, with a project participant or curator. Through re-enacting elements of a past piece of socially engaged practice we want to reflect on their work, how the memory of it shifts, and what both the artist and participant have taken from it. We will use performance and other forms of media to make and document the experience.

From these documentations, a series of artworks in the form of short video or audio pieces will be produced as well as a piece of writing. These artistic and creative outcomes are intended to test how to effectively document and share socially engaged art projects to a wider audience, and how socially engaged art is represented and collected beyond the initial piece of work. We are interested in breaking down definitions of what socially engaged practice can be and where and how, and with who, it takes place.

The artworks produced will be exhibited in Brighton at the Socially Engaged Art Space in an exhibition supported by SECP. A series of linked events will take place which invite other communities to engage in the process of documenting and discussing legacies of engaged practice. The writing and artworks will be published on the Social Art Library website.

Participating artists: Libita Clayton, Gil Doron, Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy, Young In Hong, Eelyn Lee, Harun Morrison, Ben Owen, Matt Stokes, Sophie Warren and Jonathan Moseley,