Keywords

1 Introduction

The practice and experience of art has always been tormented by the co-existence of irreconcilable trajectories of thought and patterns of action. Engagement with the arts has often been hailed as a means for deep personal fulfillment, for connecting with fundamental aspects of what it means to be human; it has been hailed as a means for cultivating imagination and for the freedom of spirit that inheres in the playfulness of aesthetic engagement. This attitude lies at the core of the Schillerian heritage that sees aesthetic activity as “the highest form of play, being primarily the free exercise of the imaginative and intellectual faculties” ([11], p. 67), enabling us to experience “a freedom to develop our imaginative and cognitive capacities, to gain knowledge of ourselves and others, and to imagine new ways of life” ([10], p. 30). This, however, has always co-existed with the erection of boundaries and hierarchies at every corner of the field of art practice, leading to the domination of sharp polarities that, in turn, have induced exclusions and silencing: ‘high’ versus ‘low’ arts, ‘lay’ audience members versus dilettante, (mostly male) artistic geniuses versus art workers, art creators (again, mostly male, of course) versus (passive) receivers [17, 31].

Education in the arts has always lived its life in the midst of this ambivalent situation, developing different educational visions, dispositions and practices as a response to the different answers to the question: “what is art education for?”: Educating informed members of the public? Identifying ‘future talents’? Destabilizing hierarchies via egalitarian approaches that capitalize on the creative potential of all? Contributing to social cohesion and discipline? Enabling the cultivation of self and social-awareness and critique? It is important to remember that these questions have been largely answered via colonialist educational epistemologies that “define how knowledge is produced and what forms of knowledge are considered legitimate” ([4], p. 410). In principle, art education has been based on the premise that among the most important contributions of the arts in the lives of people has been the cultivation of their imagination. Crucially, “the role of imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected” ([9], p. 28). Yet, it may be argued that people’s right to cultural and artistic engagement has been often seriously compromised by authoritarian and/or elitist approaches to art and music education as well as to cultural management policies.

It is all too well known that, historically, the entanglements between museums and colonialism are strong and complex [22]. But it is also important to note that there have been important and sustained efforts to decolonise the museum, to rethink and reshape its role and its relations with visitors/audience—prominent in that respect are notions such as that of “collaborative processual museology” ([35], p. 14), as is the increasing emphasis on museum activism [12, 26, 27, 34]. Kaitavuori poignantly states that “the museum is a configuration of interests. It is at the same time a heritage institution—collecting and safeguarding art and culture—and a public cultural institution, inviting the public to visit its premises and to enjoy its possessions” ([13], p. x). In its function as a public cultural institution the museum is increasingly seen as a place that offers leisure time activities and learning opportunities, a place of meeting, of getting together to relax, but also to discuss and debate. This opening has been a response to calls for “democratising culture” [24] and for advancing “cultural democracy” [42] through participatory and inclusive strategies. At the same time, the museum “increasingly, [...] is also a business” ([13], p. x) that operates on the basis of neoliberal dictums that call for marketisation of every aspect of its function.

Museum education is trying to find its way in this complex environment, somewhere between the pressure to produce measurable outcomes and the imperative of the transformative power of education. Mörsch [28] has proposed a useful conceptual map that may help one situate the different possible functions of museum-based educational work. Mörsch suggests that there exist four different discourses of gallery education: affirmative discourse “ascribes to gallery education the function of effective outward communication of the museum’s mission” ([28], p. 9). Reproductive discourse prioritizes educational initiatives that aim to educate the public, to reach out to members of the public that could become its future audience. Deconstructive discourse delineates a vision of educational work at museums as a means for critique: here the purpose “is to critically examine, together with the public, the museum and the art, as well as educational and canonizing processes that take place within this context” (ibid., p. 10). Lastly, transformative discourse emphasizes that “gallery education takes up the task of expanding the exhibiting institution and to politically constitute it as an agent of societal change” (ibid., p. 10). The first two, most dominant in museum-education practice, focus on knowledge transmission and function as tools for supporting the authority of the museum, whereas the latter two are informed by the traditions of institutional critique and critical museology and promote an approach to education as a means for problematization and change.

These four discourses delineate different approaches to the nature of audience participation. Participation in museums includes practices related to the entire spectrum of a museum’s operations: collection, exhibition, and communication. The “participatory turn” in the museum world reflects the challenge that museums are facing to strengthen their relationship with different communities in order to fulfill their social role and move towards democratization. Participatory practices attempt to respond to the increasing demand of audiences for a “a social museum experience in which they can relax, chat, interact, explore and, if they so desire, participate, contribute or even collaborate” ([3], p. 307). However, it should also be noted that participatory practices may not necessarily lead to the transformation of hegemonic power relations and knowledge production, as they are often used as an alibi that masks the surrender of the museum to market-oriented logics. As Matarasso has noted, “the growing acceptance of participatory art in centers of power risks making it another arm of institutional control, its purposes, goals and methods dictated from outside rather than negotiated between the people concerned” ([24], p. 25).

Klindt [19] proposes three distinct contexts in which the notion of participation can be situated: a cultural-educational context, a media-based context and a market-oriented context. In the cultural-educational context, participation emerges as “central to democratic theories, discourses and debates on inclusion of citizens in decision making processes” ([19], pp. 37–38) and may contribute to cultural democracy and/or democratizing culture, strengthening the museum’s social role. The focus on media-based contexts goes far beyond access and interaction issues, encompassing interpreting, evaluating, sharing and creating content. Finally, using participatory practices only for increasing the numbers of visitors and financial profit amounts to a practice of enhanced commodification and market orientation that conceives participation as the “key to the experience economy” ([19], p. 44). This reflects the anxious need of museums to reach new audiences and respond to the museums’ challenges for public accountability and financial survival. Very often museum education initiatives are required to adhere to marketing-derived patterns that lead to a consumerist approach to education that ultimately reproduces asymmetrical power relations with the participating communities.

At the same time one can detect an increasing awareness on the part of museum educators of their power as educational mediators that could resist the above described trappings. Encouragement of visitors’ empowerment which should characterize participatory practices depend on the relationships between mediators and the group members and presupposes a less intervening role for mediators, providing an open space for visitors’ decisions and contributions. Cultural mediators can question, discuss or even reverse existing hierarchies and power relations between the institution and the communities taking part. They should renounce their role as knowledge transmitter and conceive of the mediation of art “beyond the social division between the production and reproduction of knowledge” ([40], p. 3). Participatory practices in museum education could have a transformative role as far as museums are willing to question their privileges, to share their authority and to give participants the responsibility of defining the content, process, end product of their collective work, setting themselves the rules of the game [38]. Museums have to trust people as content producers, to invite them to actively participate in museum processes [25], and to recognize community members as “specialists of everyday life” moving away from their authority to a shared power and knowledge production. Participatory projects should then aim at making visitors’ voice heard, enabling community groups to contribute to the design and co-creation of exhibitions [6, 21, 30, 32] or to other forms of museum content (interpretative material such as labels, audio guides etc.). This means “not simply listening to other forms of knowledge but also allowing and enabling the existing order of knowledge to be fundamentally questioned, seized and changed” ([39], p. 3).

Theorists such as Mörsch [29] and Sternfeld [39] have emphasized the need for a critical and self-reflexive approach to gallery education, and to museum education in general. This approach problematises the rhetoric of openness and inclusion that fails to grapple with the complexities of power inequalities between museums and members of the community (that include students and young children). To that end, it calls for resisting to accept as given that policies of inclusion necessarily induce equality, shared power, and democracy. Often, the intention to reach out to ‘disadvantaged’ community members betrays a patternalist stance: “in the tradition of critical and self-reflexive gallery education, patternalist attitudes to so-called ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘hard-to-reach’ groups […] are questioned both for their paternalism and for their disciplinary dimension” ([29], p. 15). Furthermore the widespread calls for participatory approaches to art creation and creative education workshops, often obscures “the fine line between actively co-creating a project on the one hand and instrumentalising the participants as ‘material for art projects’ on the other” ([29], p. 16).

In the context of the radical democratic Museum, Nora Sternfeld suggests the idea of museums and their collections as commons, introducing the notion of an “open-source-museum, that would be to the benefit of all” ([41], p. 83). To regard museums as commons goes far beyond notions of the museum as an institution that hosts and treasures important facts of our common heritage. It means that museums and their collections are subjected to commoning practices that provide “tangible alternatives” ([8], p. 84) both to top down approaches to heritage representation and to the neoliberal transformation of museums into profitable recreational institutions. The emerging paradigm of the commons and commoning “consists then in the practice of making and managing a collective good in a manner of openness, equality, co-activity, plurality and sustainability” ([18], p. 122).

In this chapter we briefly report on four inter-artistic museum education projects that were developed as part of ‘SMOOTH-Educational Commons and Active Social Inclusion’ research program. These case studies were implemented at four museums in Thessaloniki, Greece, that form part of MOMus (Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of ThessalonikiFootnote 1): the Experimental Centre for the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Photography. In each of these case studies we took up the challenge to inquire into how creative museum education programs based on the philosophy of commons could contribute to the transformative potential of museums and museum education. The educational commons offer new possibilities in decision-making processes, knowledge production, co-management of the museum resources (premises and exhibits), co-creating content and introducing a new paradigm for inclusive participatory projects.

A core feature of the design of the case studies presented in this chapter was the creation of a ‘safe space’ that would allow for uninhibited and sustained experimenting of all participants with collective art-making practices. In these workshops, able and disabled people, and young people that come from hard-to-reach parts of the community were invited to take part in a series of creative art making workshops. We asked: what would it mean for those people and the workshop leaders/museum educators to delve into commoning procedures with the aim to improvise their ways into art/music/photography/dance on the basis of equality understood as an axiom and not an end point [33]. Central in the process has been the need to unlearn habitual patterns of teaching and learning as well as “unlearning one’s privileges” ([36], p. 30). Embracing the unexpected, de-centering or refusing control, peer governance and distribution of power among all participants have been challenges that had a deep impact on both educators and participants, despite the difficulties faced.

2 Museum Education Workshops and Educational Commons: An Outline of the MOMus Case Studies

2.1 Hear, We Go Again—Museum of Contemporary Art

The case study (CS) ‘Hear, we go again’ was fueled by the curiosity to initiate a creative dialogue between a group of deaf and hard-hearing youth and works of contemporary art. The CS was run by the MOMus Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, in collaboration with the Special High School of Deaf and Hard Hearing pupils of Thessaloniki. The CS design was led by two educators taking part in the program, adapted and implemented in collaboration with two external artists/educators working in the program, a choreographer and a visual artist, and assisted by the program’s sign-language interpreter who played a key-role in all stages of the implementation. The participants in the study were pupils 13–20 years old—number of participants: 18 at the beginning and 10 by the end of the study. The participants’ language profiles varied greatly: there was a young participant who had sign language as their mother tongue, another one who had verbal language as their mother tongue, whilst the language profiles of most students were situated somewhere between those two. The CS was implemented during 12 one-and-a-half to three-hour-long meetings between March and October 2022; five meetings were held in the museum while the rest took place at the school.

The CS developed through a series of experimentations with dancing and drawing, which were gradually used to explore the museum collections and in particular the works which the participants found most interesting. The first three sessions, which took place in the school premises, were primarily dedicated to the building and strengthening of relationships between the educators and the youth group, as well as and the youth’s familiarization with dance and visual arts as mediums for personal and collective expression. During the first meeting, the youth identified ‘emotions/feelings’ as a key theme to be explored further throughout the sessions; their desire was reflected in the content of the first exploratory sessions, however, the attempts to introduce collective decision processes in these first meetings were rather unsuccessful. The fourth meeting of this CS was the first one to take place in the premises of the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the participants were introduced to the museum spaces and explored freely the different art collections with the aim to choose the artwork that impressed them most and discuss this back with their group in an open discussion round. Central in this exploration were the museum’s permanent collections, and in particular the Iolas, Xidis, and Apergis collections, as well as some of its temporary exhibitions. In the fifth and sixth meetings, the educators returned to the school and introduced a mind-map to capture and discuss the ideas generated by the youth group at the aftermath of the exhibition visit; an additional ‘activity’ was introduced by the visual artist/educator whereby the youth were invited to design their own version of one of the museum’s exhibits, Pavlo’s Wings (1970). For the seventh meeting, the youth got back to the museum where they experimented with the use of body movements as a means to explore the museum artwork, and played an adaptation of hide and seek, which derived from their mind map ideas, whereby they were encouraged by the educators to ‘hide in the artworks and exhibits’. In the 8th meeting, the educators created a video-timeline of all preceding visits, using it as a reference point moving forward and facilitating collective decision-making; the timeline triggered interesting conversations among the participants. However, the educators’ attempt to pilot a ‘youth-council’ form of decision making eventually led to a dead-end as the educators had difficulty sharing ownership of the process with the youth. However, one of the ideas shared by a young person during this meeting served as the basis for the ‘final museum project’, namely a hidden treasure game inside the museum which could be made available and played by future visitors as well. This idea was partially realized, with a small group of young people co-designing the hidden treasure clues with one of their school teachers; although the originally planned public event did not take place, the game idea was documented in the form of videos where some of the young interlocutors addressed the museum audience and invited them to try out their game.

2.2 ‘In-And-Out-Of-Sync’: Creative Dialogues Between Russian Avant-Garde Art and Young People’s Inter-Artistic Experimentations—Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection

The case study titled ‘In and Out of Sync’ examined the creative exchanges between Russian Avant-garde art and the artistic experimentations of young students within the context of the educational commons in museums. The MOMus Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection served as the primary research partner for this case study, which involved four educators (comprising three museum educators and one music educator). The study involved 25 students, aged 15–18, from a nearby vocational high school. Over a period of three months, the case study unfolded through nine weekly sessions, each lasting three hours, all conducted within the museum’s premises.

Utilizing a range of visual arts tools and musical instruments and drawing inspiration from the first international exhibition of works by Russian avant-garde artist Ivan Kliun, titled ‘Ivan Kliun. Transcendental landscapes. Flying sculptures. Light spheres’ the educational project aimed to engage young participants as co-creators within the museum. The project consistently aligned with the values of the commons, such as serendipity, openness, care, experimentation, and creative participation.

The case study adopted an open design approach, where the outcomes of each meeting served as the foundation for subsequent steps. Collective decision-making processes, involving both the youth and educators and employing tools such as pedagogical documentation, self-reflection, and youth councils, played a pivotal role in shaping the content and flow of each session. These nine meetings culminated in the creation of a multimodal installation that employed diverse artistic mediums to explore the themes of war and (non) peace within the youths’ experiences. The young participants chose the name ‘Liberation, probably in another language’ for their artwork, actively participated in its arrangement and installation, and presented it during International Museum Day in 2022. Importantly, all nine meetings, including the final public event, took place within the museum premises.

The initial two meetings were intentionally dedicated to establishing the foundations of relationships between the youth and educators, as well as reshaping existing dynamics among the youth themselves. These ongoing processes of relationship-building remained central throughout the design and progression of the case study. Key aspects of these first two meetings included documenting the commonalities within the group and familiarizing the participants with museum spaces, particularly the ‘dark room’. This ground-floor room, isolated from the museum’s main exhibition areas, was exclusively allocated to the young participants, who affectionately referred to it as their ‘headquarters’. At the outset, the room was deliberately left vacant, inviting the youth to personalize it by bringing their personal items to decorate it in subsequent meetings. Notably, the ‘dark room’ continued to host the exhibition of the multimodal artwork created by the youth for several months after the conclusion of the case study. Another significant outcome of the first two meetings was the collaborative development of a ‘team contract’, a dynamic ‘code of conduct’ that served as a reference point for all members, guiding their interactions. This included the requirement for consent before any digital recording and the right to address any concerns when educators inadvertently assumed traditional ‘teacher-roles’ with associated hierarchical dynamics.

During the third meeting, a majority of the youth collectively expressed their interest in exploring the museum’s exhibitions on the first and second floors independently. After a general introduction by the educators, the youth decided to explore the exhibitions on their own, seeking guidance only when specific information about an artwork was needed. Following this visit, they attempted to replicate the artworks they found most compelling and began composing poems inspired by the museum’s exhibits. The fourth meeting proved to be a turning point, leading to what educators later referred to as a minor internal ‘crisis’. It highlighted the challenges of transcending well-established professional roles and expertise, sharing responsibilities with the youth, and striking a balance between the predetermined ‘framework’ and the serendipity and fluidity inherent in the creative process within the context of the educational commons. Following this meeting, educators introduced examples of artwork combining music with visual arts and introduced the concept of assemblies for collective decision-making to the youth. The youth embraced this idea and conducted their first youth-led assembly, where they expressed their desire to create an artwork to be displayed within the museum. This youth assembly extended to their school hours, where they collectively determined the theme for their collaborative artwork. During their subsequent visits to the museum, the youth began developing their ideas, initially exploring themes and later incorporating music and visual art mediums. Their collective work eventually materialized in a synthesis of artworks, exploring the facets of (non) peace and war through their everyday experiences that held significance to them.

2.3 ‘Common Ground’—Experimental Center for the Arts

The CS ‘Common Ground’ was run by the MOMus—Experimental Center for the Arts, in collaboration with a theatre group of 15 people aged 16–30 years old and 4 educators, two theatre, one dance and one composer-educator that are permanent members of the group. The group of participants consisted of 9 people with varied disabilities, such as down syndrome, Αsperger syndrome or autism and 6 non-disabled people, both professional and amateur actors/actresses. The CS design and implementation was led by the group’s educators in close consultation with the museum’s director and the research team. ‘Common Ground’ was implemented at the Experimental Center for the Arts during 13 three-hour-long meetings over a period of three months. Concurrently, the Experimental Center for the Arts organized the exhibition ‘The Event of a Thread’ in collaboration with ifa (Institut fűr Auslandbezienhungen) with the support of Goethe—Institut Thessaloniki. The exhibition presented various textile artworks, including large scale dolls, bed sheets, carpets and decorative elements, highlighting issues of tradition and folk knowledge transmission related to the universal practice of knitting through the work of 23 artists. The exhibition offered new interpretations to the ‘events of the thread’ that are closely related to ‘material, spiritual, visual and economic’ factors.Footnote 2

The CS ‘Common Ground’ aimed to initiate a creative dialogue between the group and the museum, strengthening the group’s active participation in the artistic and social life of the city, thus contributing to social inclusion. Taking theater, music and dance as a starting point, and seeking to find connections between their creative engagement and the temporary exhibition of the museum, the participants were invited to co-create a safe space where they could express and exchange ideas, feelings, needs and dreams. During the meetings the group experimented with movement scores, music, performance, open improvisations and social dreaming, a method that encourages shared “thinking through exploring dreams, using the methods of free association, amplification, and systemic thinking, so as to make links and find connections in order to discover new thinking and thoughts” ([20], p. 13).

In the early meetings the group experimented in the empty museum’s space, as the exhibition was still under construction. The emptiness offered a great sense of freedom to the participants. They used their imagination to ‘fill’ the museum with exhibits: the entrance and exit signs, the ceiling, chairs and benches and the empty walls, all became exhibits in their eyes and were interpreted and approached through movement, dance and words. In the next meetings as the exhibition was all set up, the group interacted individually and collectively with the exhibits, reproducing bodily the shape or sense of their favorite and walking and dancing in the museum as a moving work of art. The group also spent some time experimenting in outer space, in the port of Thessaloniki, where the museum is situated, in an attempt to ‘free’ the forms that they created inside and make them larger, more open and also visible to the public. In the meetings that followed, a set of certain elements derived from the exhibition, such as circles, patterns, knots and loops was approached via movement, dance and music both through activities led by the educators as well as with open improvisations. In many cases throughout the CS the participants decided to just listen to music, to engage in free dance sessions or to draw individually. Meanwhile circles, patterns, knots and loops functioned as a common vocabulary that led to the creation of personal and collective improvised performances. In the last few meetings, the group collectively decided to publicly perform a set of three improvisations and also to invite the spectators to participate in a social dreaming session. While building up on their final idea, the participants, apart from using experimental artistic tools, they as well developed further their emotional and physical connection with the exhibits; they touched, smelled and moved them, danced with them or even hid behind them.

The performance was titled ‘Common Ground’, and took place on the 10th of April 2022 at the Experimental Center for the Arts. As decided by the group, three different 20 min long improvisations were performed, followed by an open discussion with the audience. The audience also took part in the social dreaming session, lying down on the floor next to the performers, narrating night-dreams and thoughts and reflecting on their common experience.

2.4 ‘City as Commons’—Museum of Photography

‘City as Commons’ took place at the MOMus—Photography Museum and was designed and implemented by two educators, an art educator and a professional photographer. Throughout the CS the participants experimented with a variety of photography techniques as well as with art techniques such as collage and three-dimensional creations. They were also led to develop a fresh look at their neighborhood and finally, they employed collective decision-making processes that led to the production of a booklet containing their own photos, words and (photographed) three-dimensional creations, and to a photo exhibition held in their school. Eleven students aged 12–14 from a multicultural high school situated in a rather degraded area of the city took part in the workshops, along with two of their school teachers who did not just accompany their pupils but assumed the role of full participants. The CS consisted of a total of thirteen two-to-three-hour-long weekly meetings over a period of four months. Most meetings took place at the school, while a small number only, due to bureaucratic reasons, were held at the museum.

The first two meetings took place in the school. In the first, the students were introduced to the project; ice-breaking games were played and collective discussions on the plenary were held. The second meeting was built around the idea of finding a name for the group which gave rise to discussions about nationality, neighborhood issues and common interests among the participants. A photography activity, decided by the students, offered the opportunity to study the internal space and the schoolyard, to wander around the familiar environment observing unnoticed details or spots that bear special memories connected to school life. The two following meetings were organized in the Photography Museum. The fourty minutes walk from the school to the museum functioned as inspiration for taking photographs and led to informal conversations and deeper observation of the neighborhood—buildings, plants, people, road signs and monuments. By the time of their arrival at the museum, the participants were surprised to see that a big cork board was full of the photographs they had taken on their previous meetings while the educators informed them that the board is to be used freely by the group. A set of rules was also agreed upon, followed by an open reflective conversation about the content of their photographs. During the following meetings in the school the participants experimented with photo-stories, organizing a photo-marathon, a ten minute challenge where they had to take photos of certain elements on which they had decided by themselves on the plenary, sharing equipment, and beginning to collectively document their neighborhood through photographs, drawings, maps and words. The ninth meeting took place at the museum where the participants began composing their photographic and artistic material, creating collages and snapshots of storytelling. During their tenth meeting they experimented further with the creation of mixed media—three dimensional collages using photographs and drawings. The last two meetings were dedicated to building their final ideas, leading to the production of a booklet called ‘A city imagined’ including selected artworks created by them and also a photography exhibition. In the last meeting, the exhibition was presented to the school community and printouts of the booklet were given to the students and their school teachers.

3 Practicing Commoning: some Reflections

3.1 Creating Art, Creating Links with the Museum

Experimental Center for the Arts: Dancing with the exhibits. The participants ask the educators if they can ‘just dance’: they delve into a free, unchoreographed, performance (see Fig. 1). The educator chooses an instrumental adagio—the music begins. Two girls and two boys are lying on the floor, others prefer to sit on the ground while a girl finds her place on the lap of the person in the wheelchair. Bodies start moving at a slow pace, stretching, flexing, arching, expanding and shrinking, becoming dots in space or occupying as much space as possible. A change in the tempo of the music leads to a change of mood that is reflected on bodies and facial expressions. Participants explore the space with curiosity, speed and intensity; they cross the room, run around, jump high, crawl, meet other bodies, form groups, become pairs or move individually. Soon they begin establishing a physical relationship with the exhibits, smelling, touching and moving them. They hide behind them or lie down under them and use their shape, color or texture as means of inspiration. A girl says “I like hiding my face in these quilts. Every time I want to relax a bit I hide my face there and I feel like I’m in my own bed”. Another participant mentions “I wonder if these quilts can fit in my bed”. Space, exhibits, different bodies, sounds; they all act as stimuli in this dance. When the music ends, the participants continue dancing by producing sounds and rhythmic patterns using body percussion. Gradually water bottles, wooden blocks, plastic cups and bags, jewelry and keys enter the game. By beating the wooden floor, repeating words and rhythms the group creates a soundscape for their dance. The freedom that results from the improvisatory character of the performance seems liberating, as exploration, expressiveness and joy take center stage. After half an hour sounds and movement begin to fade out. The participants gather at the center of the room; they lay down. A girl that rarely has physical contact with other people hugs everyone, while another girl says “let’s do it again. Let’s dance and do nothing else”.

Fig. 1
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Participants of the MOMus experimental center for the arts dancing in the museum’s main exhibition hall, March 2022

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Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection: Capturing the sense of liberation. “War and peace”: a student takes the floor to announce the open theme around which the youth artwork will unfold. Last week, the student explains, the whole class took time during school hours to brainstorm and vote on the thematic lens through which we wish to voice what matters to us. The dark room is now occupied with a vigorous conversation where one young person after the other shares stories related to the experience of non-peace; most experiences they recount have taken place inside school. “For me, it would be peaceful enough if all young people could go to school without feeling scared. There is racism”, explains one student, pointing to her vest top and commenting how it becomes a subject of sexist commentary in school. The students wish for their art piece to capture the meaning and feeling of ‘peace’ through its absence in the everyday life of a young person. The youth continue their conversations negotiating the aesthetic of their collective artwork, aiming, with the assistance of the educators, to remove the focus from the ‘final product’ towards more experimental forms of expression (see Fig. 2). Through experimentation with different art mediums, the youth wish to bring to the fore their own matters of concern from inside and outside of school (including the acceptance for each other’s differences; their fights for inclusivity against sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, patriarchy and harassment; their relationships with their peers and teachers), to explore them in their own means outside of terms of ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, and to eventually share them with a wider audience beyond their school by making their artwork public.

Fig. 2
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Young participants of the MOMus modern case study arranging their artwork towards their final creation Liberation, probably in another language

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Museum of Contemporary Art: Feeling the sound, feeling each other. We all look hesitant, slowly hitting different parts of our bodies as we engage for the first time in the body percussion exercise. We count from one to nine, repeating each cycle four times before moving on to the next one. Around me, I can grasp some hits falling momentarily ‘out of rhythm’, whilst impressively realigning to a synched sound. The bodies in our circle seem to coordinate through gazes and bodily vibrations; I wonder how our collective pulse feels to those who cannot hear. I wonder how we achieve this level of coordination without physically ‘listening’ to each other’s sound, which other vibrations pierce our bodies in that moment, connecting us to the ground beneath our feet… What started as a ‘warm-up’ exercise in one of the first meetings, gradually evolves to a central exercise for the group’s coordination, following the young participants’ demand for it (see Fig. 3). Body percussion becomes one of the few instances where the educators, the researcher, and the young participants communicate with each other without the interpreter’s intervention. As an exercise, body percussion moves away from an expectation of an ‘end product’, growing to be an integral step in the group’s coordination; it becomes a ‘happening’ where the communication barrier between the hearing, hard-hearing, and deaf actors is lifted, however momentarily, allowing for the emergence of a commoning experience through freedom of self-expression and creation of a shared musical space that permits active participation and communication beyond the use of speech.

Fig. 3
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Young participants of the MOMus contemporary museum case study performing body percussion at the museum auditorium, March 2022

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Photography Museum: Familiar spaces in new light. We meet the participants in the classroom after the break. We have previously decided collectively our next move; we are going to wander around the neighborhood and take photos, draw or write comments about what we like and what we don’t, what we need to change and what our dreams about this place are. We break out in three groups, we take bags, papers, color pencils and cameras and we go outside the school premises. We start walking on the lanes around the school building but soon we begin to explore longer routes. The young participants document through photography the daily life of the neighborhood (see Fig. 4); workers, shops and small industries, hidden spots, abandoned buildings, empty roads, nature, things found on the street, full dumpsters, signs. A girl chooses not to take photographs but to write down the comments and observations expressed. She draws recycle bins on a piece of paper and notes that “this is something that is missing”. At some point the group stops in front of a field. A boy observes “it would be nice if these empty fields didn’t have fences, so that we could go in and play” and another one suggests that “these empty fields could have been a park”. “Well, it was a park once, but then the grass grew very tall and nobody took care of it” another participant recalls. “Everything that we see here could be nicer, I think”, a boy suggests; a girl adds: “if only there were brighter colors in the neighborhood…”. They share the same camera in order to take photos of the field and they all keep quiet and stand still when one of them is trying to take a photo of a little bird. They regularly turn to the professional photographer of the group for advice regarding lenses, the role of light, and more. They keep on narrating stories about the neighborhood all along. We return to the classroom, we take a look at the photographs taken and read outloud the comments noted down. A participant observes “it’s like seeing the neighborhood but with new eyes”.

Fig. 4
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Young participants of the photography museum case study documenting their neighborhood through photography, March 2023

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3.2 The Many Faces of Participation

Looking at the four MOMus CS through a cultural-educational perspective on participation [19], we observed that participation revolved primarily across two central axes, namely those of decision making and creative artistic engagement, whilst the element of unlearning remained prevalent and relevant throughout. We take a closer look at our key findings around participation below.

Our findings across the four CS show that participation is first and foremost a dynamic process and requires a number of complex skills that need to be learned and developed through practice. It seems that young people’s highly institutionalized lives allow little space and opportunities for them to learn how to participate. Therefore, taking decisions about matters that concern them is something that has to be learned. Even more so in cases where some disability groups rely normally on their guardians and significant others to make decisions for their lives and care even beyond their youth; what forms could participation take in these cases and how could it be experienced? Many times, in the course of the evolution of our case studies, we were often faced with the discomfort of some young people when they were invited to participate in the shaping of their experience without being provided with the resources and guidance to do so. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that youth participation in the institutional context of museums is a process facilitated by the educators. In a similar vein, we observed that in occasions where the educators were themselves modeling participatory practices (e.g. in their collaboration with each other), young participants found they had a strong reference point and an example to follow.

Young people’s participation relied heavily on the educators’ disposition, particularly on the latter’s willingness to let go of their role as experts and engage in a process of unlearning. Unless the educators were intentionally taking a step back from their role and were open to being challenged in their thinking, youth participation was only expressed in very contained, often limited and tokenistic ways. Here, it is also important to highlight that some young participants had sometimes different understanding of what participation means to them that was not always recognized by the educators. To give an example, there have been occasions where a young person felt more comfortable to frame their participation by observing an activity instead of actively contributing to it in some other way, a disposition that was, however, not always respected by the educator.

Another key finding concerns the role of time and space in facilitating the young people’s participation. Having a sense of ownership over the management of space, as in the case of the ‘dark room’ in the MOMus Modern museum, or over the flow and content of a day, young people reported feeling encouraged to participate more in the program and showed increased interest in its evolution. Here, it is important to note that some educators argued that young people’s participation in the shaping of their learning experience in all its aspects has the potential to address and tackle social inequalities even outside educational environments. And of course, in those case studies where people with disabilities took part, the need for broadening the ways in which participation is framed in ways that go beyond the assumptions of ableism [5] emerged very strongly.

In Table 1, we provide an overview of the key-observations with regard to participation from the MOMus CS.

Table 1 An overview of key-observations with regard to participation
Full size table

4 Conclusions: Towards an Open-Source Museum

The above described museum education common-based projects enable us to argue in favor of the power of museum education to re-shape core aspects of the way in which museums might establish a different kind of relationship with young people. These projects highlighted ways in which commoning practices might help a museum function as an open-source by (i) introducing new ways through which the museum might be experienced by members of its community as a common space, and (ii) by enabling the participants to delve into art practices that lead to a creative relationship with museum content and exhibits, recasting them as open source materials that can be leveraged by its community.

Central to the process of recasting the museum as an open source institution is the opening up of possibilities for the young participants to ‘leave their mark’ in the museum, for example through the creation of artworks that stay for some time in the museum’s premises, or through open performances linked to the exhibits and presented publicly. This led to inclusion: participants with very different profiles, abilities and background were encouraged to work together, to work creatively, and to develop ownership over the creative process. It should be noted, however, that the notion of inclusiveness may be realized via a variety of strategies that are not necessarily linked to openness and equality, which are considered crucial for a commoning approach to cultural education.

Against the subsumption to the neoliberal rhetoric that dictates the achievement of increased audience numbers and pursue light leisure activities that boost the museum’s income, the Smooth research program sought to create a cultural educational context [19] that leads to democratizing the museum and provided an opportunity for museum personnel—museum directors, museum staff, museum educators—to redefine and reflect on their practices, for a shift in re-imagining inclusive and participatory actions.

Educators were confronted with a variety of practical constraints related to the management of space and time. In two of our CS practical constraints permitted only a few visits to the museum, as most meetings were held at the school. This fragmented contact with the museum space limited the possibilities for familiarization with the institution and the exhibits, and for overturning existing assumptions regarding participation. On the other hand, in the CSs that were almost entirely implemented in museum premises, participants were encouraged to ‘hack the museum’—a slogan used at the Museum of Modern Art—and to organize public performances—as in the case of the Experimental Arts Center. Therefore, space emerged as an important parameter for implementing educational commons in art museums. Most importantly, the familiarization with the museum exhibitions helped participants to construct new routines and to reverse existing student-educator hierarchies.

Time was also an important factor for cultivating egalitarian forms of participation, and more open engagement with art practices, leading to the development of a relation to the museum as a common resource. Educational time, freed from the pressure of achieving measurable outcomes, created possibilities for discussing, sharing and debating both over issues related to the direction of creative engagement, and issues related to commoning governance processes.

Reflecting on our four case studies as a whole, we could argue that critical for the successful implementation of commons-based creative educational work in museum contexts is the existence of a set of certain qualities that permeate both creative art making and the character of collaboration and sharing:

  • Dismeasure [7]: “losing a sense of time in the process of teaching and studying, avoiding linearity, and being taken into unexpected territories as a result of exploration” ([16], p. 155).

  • Suspension [7]: “the possibility to step ‘outside’ ordinary time and practices, outside the imposed obligation to ‘produce’ use-value” ([16], p. 156).

  • Profanation [1]: “an act of moving beyond the sacred character of knowledge, freeing it from its canonic, hierarchical use and function, opening it up for playful engagement “at everyone’s disposal for ‘free use’” ([23], p. 159). Profanation induces playing with ideas, studying them in unexpected ways, studying them away from their formal function and application” ([14], p. 96).

The implementation of those case studies has been particularly challenging for museum educators, in that they had to embrace ‘the impossible’, initiating a mode of educational practice that moves “beyond the pragmatic and functionalist implementation of an idea or a program […] [and] encourages acceptance of a massive loss of control and of the risk of failure” ([37], p. 5).

In order to infuse creative artistic practices with the ideals of educational commons, the educators had to liberate themselves for traditional patterns of action, placing co-creation at the center of the process, prioritizing the creative act as a way of initiating a dialogue between the participants, opening the way towards ‘a pedagogy of open form’ ([15], based on [2]). Such a pedagogy requires “unlearning the things we take for granted, as well as those that our audience does. In the process, we create contexts and ask questions of ourselves, of the institutions in which and with which we work, and of society” ([37], p. 9). In this way, commons-based creative educational work might be seen as belonging to what Mӧrsch has referred to as of transformative discourse of gallery education, “expanding the exhibiting institution” and enabling it to function “as agent of societal change” (28), p. 10).

Thus, commons-based creative museum education can be seen “as an expression of a desire for a future that is more socially equal” ([8], p. 80). As Alexandros Kioupkiolis has stressed, “commoning practices start from the need to fundamentally change in social life”, and encourage “a collaborative mode of living, acting and organizing in terms of collective autonomy, equal freedom, creativity, diversity, sharing and participation, eschewing top-down, centralizing logics of the state and a profit-driven individualism of neoliberal markets” ([18], p. 113).