PIT - Perform Inform Transform: Participatory Performance in Art Museums

In a post-Covid world grappling with tensions, there's a growing anxiety in our democracies. ‘Perform Inform Transform: Participatory Performance in Art Museums’ (PIT) addresses these challenges by exploring new forms of live activation between bodies and places of knowledge and heritage like museums. Through performance art, it reconnects citizens with their bodies, other individuals, and democracies, requiring different mediation spaces and actions for physical expression.

Performances can fuel the relationship between citizens and museums, proposing new paradigms for participatory and intergenerational dialogues. Yet, their circulation, production, and presentation present challenges, raising various ethical, environmental, technical, operational, and artistic questions.

Enhancing the recognition, mobility, and visibility of this hybrid art form and its societal value has become an urgent issue. The objectives are to:

1. Improve understanding and stimulate global knowledge exchanges among professionals regarding the challenges of integrating participatory performative practices into museums;

2. Stimulate creative capacities of communities and performance artists through collaborative processes within museums across Europe;

3. Support the transnational mobility and visibility of performance art involving communities;

4. Develop and disseminate a European Performance Art Manifesto outlining protocols of collaboration between performance art, museums and communities;

5. Raise awareness and facilitate a deeper understanding on the potential of performance art for communities and museums among larger audiences and policymakers in at least six countries PIT proposes 12 nomadic co-productions, 21 research networking and training activities for 560 professionals across the EU & beyond, contributing to their professional development and the empowerment of 130 young and elderly citizens. This proposal is based on the expertise of 6 partners and 16 associated partners.