ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to share, with a practical approach, our experience as artists-scientists, encouraging more researchers to create and exhibit their art-based research. Art that is based on scientific studies has, so far, offered a multisensory, multifaceted, discursive, experiential, and subjective understanding of an investigated problem, not just to researchers, but also to fieldwork participants and to art show visitors, because of the co-creative dialogue that is established among them. When thinking about their scientific studies through media and senses that are not the ones they are used to (i.e., the written paper and the oral lecture), scholars are forced to step outside their comfort zone. In our practical experience, we have been able to deepen and rethink our interpretations of research data while interacting with field participants, while planning our artwork, while building art pieces, and while talking to visitors during exhibitions, in an iterative process where errors become opportunities. In this chapter, we first describe three practical examples of ABR to fuel readers’ reflection, commenting on all steps of the destabilising, insightful, and open process that is fieldwork and community participation, data interpretation, art conceptualisation, and art execution. We proceed to compare the advantages of ABR that previous scholars have discussed with the added advantages that our own art-based research has tapped into. Finally, we reflect on how the intersection of arts and sciences might change after the global pandemic.
