Art, Activism and Rock n Roll: Radical Art Collectives in South East Asia

This chapter draws on our experiences working with radical arts collectives across South East Asia – notably in Indonesia with Taring Padi – to explore a range of socially engaged art practices that employ participatory methodologies and are underpinned by a focus on community and social impact. The socially engaged art work of these groups operates with an entanglement of contexts – social, cultural, political, economic and historical. They draw on histories of participatory, emancipatory art practices in the region which have been applied into community engagement and transformation. The art work creatively embodies community relations, from re-staging a scarecrow festival with rice farmers to open conversations about using genetically modified rice (Hill-Smith, Nicolai and Potter 2002), to establishing a transmedia art program in a rundown apartment building in the heart of Phnom Penh (Potter and Louth 2017). The outcomes from these consciousness raising approaches generates new understandings of culture, history and community. It provides a strengths-based approach that privileges local stories and experience, allowing communities to re-imagine what development might mean to them – an ongoing act of positive deviance enabled through the work of art.