AMASS
Acting on the Margins. Arts as Social Sculpture.

Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS) is an arts-based action research project that aims to create concrete opportunities for people to come together and accompany artists as agents in creative projects and interpretations.

This multidisciplinary project considers a wide field of disciplines and through participatory approaches, it uses practical methods from the field of service design to explore the role of the arts in mitigating societal challenges, aiming at capturing, assessing and harnessing the societal impact of the arts and further generate social impact through policy recommendations.

It also identifies, explores, collates, evaluates and analyzes existing and new innovative productions, experiments and case studies from the perspective and the physical positioning of European countries ‘on the margins’ in the underserved northern, southern, western and eastern regions. It sets up 35 experiments in these peripheries to investigate the educational effects of the STEAM model in integrating the arts with science through participatory and multidisciplinary approaches (more details here).

The challenges addressed by AMASS are: the future of work in creative, cultural and other sectors, radical ideologies and extremism, societal polarisation and stratification, lack of civil society participation, populism and migration.

Link to AMASS publications.

Link to AMASS MOOC.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870621.