We are artists, scholars, and community workers from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, the Institute of Social Work and the Department of Creative Arts at the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Across three gatherings in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Vienna (Austria), we explored how our surroundings are shaped by extractivism and dispossession, and how artistic practices can foster care, witnessing, mourning, and also an imagination of worlds beyond extraction.

In this exposition, seven research practitioners investigate how creative practice can be applied as a form of knowledge production in order to disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts. These applications of creative practice take varied and complex forms, often transferring creativity from the practitioner-researcher to their participants, increasing participant agency or re-defining existing hierarchies, as they form, empower, and enlighten real and conceptual communities.