Contemporary Arts in Rural Development: Lessons from Japan and the UK

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The proposal aims to bring together groups of academics interested in rural development, artists, art professionals and policy makers interested in rural and regional contexts in order to explore the contribution of contemporary arts in the social and economic development of rural places. The proposal builds on an existing partnership between Newcastle University and Tokyo Universities (evidenced with sabbatical exchanges of Gkartzios and Yagi across each other's academic units and a memorandum of understanding between the two institutes) and aims to strengthen this relationship with a common research agenda on contemporary arts in rural development. Both institutes have experience engaging with creative stakeholders. For example, Yagi and Toishi at the University of Tokyo have supervised student research projects the impact of art festivals in the development of rural places. Gkartzios and Yagi conducted fieldwork (while Gkartzios was Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo) on the governance and impact of an art festival (i.e. the Oku-Noto Trienalle) in a remote and depopulated rural area in Japan. Gkartzios and Pollock have established links and research projects (including projects funded from AHRC) with cultural stakeholders in Northumberland and Scotland and both have published on the role of art in rural development (e.g. in the Journal of Rural Studies). The research proposal bring together for the first time pioneering art professionals and rural development experts to look internationally the potential of contemporary art in rural development contexts. It includes critical contributions from Japan's Art Front Gallery (world famous for its contributions in rural development through the vision of Director Fram Kitagawa organising rural art festivals such as Echigo-Tsumari and Setouchi), England's Berwick Visual Arts, and Scotland's Stove Network. All these stakeholders have significant experience of art interventions in rural contexts through art residency programmes, organisation of rural art festivals, and have established networks with community groups in rural locales. The proposal will create a dynamic network of those stakeholders who will exchange knowledge and plan a common research agenda through two 'residential weeks' scheduled in the UK and in Japan. The programme of the residential weeks will be drafted by the academic investigators in partnership with the cultural stakeholders. Artists, early career researchers and policy stakeholders will be involved in these workshops. Presentation, discussions and artistic interventions during the workshops will be documented and uploaded on the project web pages and will be further disseminated through the partners' social media pages. The final outcome of the project will be a collaborative and comparative research proposal which will be submitted for subsequent funding to an appropriate research council and lay the foundations for an exciting, transdisciplinary and symmetric research project across the UK and Japan.