Artistic Research Platform

The articulation of the value of artistic research is one of ELIA’s strategic priorities.

For the past few years, ELIA has had a very active and multidisciplinary working group and platform focused on Artistic Research. The working group has identified priorities aimed at continuing the work undertaken during one of ELIA’s past projects, SHARE, and strengthening its network.

On behalf of ELIA, the working group developed The Florence Principles, a position paper on artistic doctorates, presented at the ELIA Biennial Conference 2016 in Florence.

This position paper was successfully used to give recognition to artistic doctorates at a European and national level.

ELIA also worked on increasing the visibility of Artistic Research on the European level, by contributing to the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research (published in collaboration with AEC and other networks in June 2020) and by endorsing Paulo de Assis as ELIA’s nominee to the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission.

ELIA is involved in the strategic partnership Erasmus+ project Advancing Supervision for Artistic Research Doctorates, developed in a transnational cooperation setting and coordinated by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In the frame of this project, ELIA organised the Challenges of Doctoral Supervision at the end of September 2019.
The final publication of the project Undoing Supervision. A Compendium of Key Issues in Supervising Artistic Research Doctorates aims to present the outcomes of a three-year strategic partnership project in a nutshell. As such, it is to be understood as a polyvocal document, intended as a contribution to the field of artistic research and the advancement of artistic research doctorates. You can download the e-book here. The final outputs of the project can be found here.

ELIA is also a partner in the CA2RE+ project (ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership), which includes a series of biannual international and intercultural intensive study programmes for doctoral candidates, guided by experienced evaluators from participating universities and invited experts.

During the ELIA Artistic Research Platform (Online) Meeting 2020, participants used the digital platform Padlet over two days to map the disciplinary fields of Circus, Fine Art, Choreography, Literature, Architecture, Theatre, Film, Applied Arts, Design and Artistic Research Study. As each iteration of the methodology unfolded, it connected with other disciplinary islands around common problems and challenges.
The Unislanding Artistic Research: A Decolonial Dialogue (digital pamphlet) is the outcome of this meeting and has been produced by the Working Group for Artistic Research.

A consortium of stakeholders in the higher arts education sector including ELIA, all of whom are signatories of the Vienna Declaration issued in 2020, have recently submitted a set of proposed text changes to the Frascati Manual to the OECD's NESTI Bureau.

The changes take their starting point in the statement of the 2015 edition of the Manual, where the arts for the first time are recognised by the manual as a knowledge domain in itself. The proposal by the higher arts education sector includes several reformulations in relation to this knowledge domain.

The letter calls for support of a list of amendments and proposes that these be discussed at the upcoming OECD NESTI Bureau meeting in September. The signatories hope to make a presentation of the proposals at this event. You can read the letter of proposed changes here.

The ELIA Artistic Research Working Group's latest resource, Towards a Manifesto for Artistic Research: SCORE #1, builds on discussions about the future of artistic research within the open research paradigm. These conversations, held through three online sessions, culminated in the ELIA Artistic Research Platform event at the ELIA Biennial 2024 in Milan. The publication highlights key insights, concerns, and motivations from the ELIA community as they work towards creating a manifesto.

If this topic interests you and you are on staff at an ELIA member institution, you can join the Artistic Research Platform in the signed-in environment, MyELIA. You can also reach out to ELIA Community Manager Amalia Smyrnioti to find out how you can get involved.

Click here to review all of ELIA's working groups.

Artistic Research Platform

Since the 2018 Rotterdam Biennial, ELIA members have continued to exchange regarding artistic research in the Artistic Research Platform. The first platform event was hosted by Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in June 2019 and the second was a digital event in September 2020.  Events of the platform are developed by the working group Artistic Research.