| Community-based arts for social change sometimes fall into colonial traps without a strong ethical, philosophical, and critical postcolonial frame. The modernist language of the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed goes a long way towards interrupting the hegemony of expert-driven art and education, yet each is delimited by the modernist and materialist worlds in which it was born. Liberation Arts and Community Engagement is inspired by the modernist liberation theology and liberation psychology movements that arose during the time of Freire and Boal, but is informed by postcolonial, indigenous feminist movements that have arisen since then. Liberation Arts and Community Engagement (LACE) serves as a postcolonial guide for cultural fieldworkers who find themselves in a more complex world where modernist constructions of protagonist and antagonist are not so clear, yet whose aim is towards the production of liberation as opposed to the presentation of art. The acronym LACE fittingly suggests a weaving together of disparate struggles towards a new, intersectional relationship. It ties together different forms of media and art to reflect the changing society in which we live. Its carefully considered 8-phase progressive methodology identifies moments of potential imperialism in community-based art projects and restores horizontality and criticality to public art projects, ensuring sustainability and autonomous engagement from the people most proximate to the rupture in question. Perhaps most controversially, it dissolves false boundaries between the personal and political, the material Marxist and the essentialist spiritual domains, the concrete and abstract worlds. |
