Art and Reconciliation

Abstract

Art and reconciliation is an emerging area of scholarship and practice that explores the potential of art in transitional justice, specifically to foster one of its core goals: reconciliation. Art encompasses a wide range of practices, from large public art initiatives to very small-scale participatory workshops, and involves diverse art forms, including fine art, photography, film, theatre, dance, music, embodied practice, and traditional crafts. Reconciliation is more difficult to define but is usually conceptualized as a process of coming to terms, which can occur at a variety of different levelswith oneself and one's own experience, with other individuals, within a community, society or state, or interstate. The relationship between art and reconciliation is both instrumentalwhat can art do to help foster reconciliation, and what are its limitations?and instructivewhat can art tell us about what reconciliation might entail?

Fear and loathing in monuments: Rethinking the politics and practices of monumentality and monumentalization

“…This intimate connection to the past, this ability to hold it in one’s hands and to understand it as an individual life lost, can create shared spaces of remembering and mourning, listening and learning, and envisioning and committing to more peaceful futures. As Rachel Kerr (2017) argues, effective reconciliation requires the “ongoing processes of building relationships and mutual respect that are crucial to social repair” (p. 3). And while monuments and the arts more broadly are not and should not be considered a replacement for more formal policy-based processes, arts-based processes can “provide a ‘creative pathway’ to reconciliation, breaking silences, transforming relationships, communicating across cultural divides and providing a means of dealing with trauma and restoring human dignity.” Effective conflict recovery and prevention requires the meaningful encouragement and development of social cohesion, aided by efforts to imagine and cultivate different sets of relationships and ways of thinking and being in community.…”