ABSTRACT
Anna Leander (Copenhagen Business School/PUC Rio de Janeiro) and Donatella della Ratta (American University Rome)
This chapter argues that art/creative expression is a form of conflict resolution expertise and that it is important to acknowledge it as such. Theatre, drawing, music and film are not only therapeutic practices in the hands of specialists or sources of information. They are a specific form of knowledge that generates engagements with conflict resolution and that are themselves implicated in the transformation of conflict resolution expertise. In a stylized dialogue around Donatella della Ratta’s work with Creative Expression in Syria, we offer a contextually situated account and example of what role art/creative expression can have in the assembling of conflict resolution expertise. We point to it as contributing a privileged form of knowledge about layered memory, everyday affect and haptic sense-making. We argue that it paves the way for an expansion of the voices, a reconceptualization of the spaces and a rethinking of the visions engaged in conflict resolution. And we highlight that it is itself a site of transformation of knowledge about conflicts. We highlight both the very significant contributions of art/creative expressions to the assembling of expertise and the importance of recognizing its limits; of not fetishizing art/artists/artistic visions. Instead, we suggest that art/creative expression is symmetric to other forms of conflict resolution expertise. Its assembling into conflict resolution expertise should therefore be engaged in the same critical and reflexive vein as other forms of knowledge.
