Levende verhalen: co-creatie en representatie in muurschilderingen voor een inclusieve samenleving.

Within the cultural sector, there is a strong focus on social impact and inclusive arts and culture offerings. Attracting diverse audiences, lowering barriers to participation in arts and cultural activities, and achieving social impact are important goals.

Murals are an accessible form of visual culture in public spaces that can beautify the living environment and make local stories visible. Because they can bring the past to life, they serve as carriers of intangible cultural heritage. Blind Walls Gallery (BWG) creates locally meaningful murals by gathering stories from residents in a co-creative process. In this way, design power is used to increase residents' involvement in their city or neighbourhood.

As a pioneer, BWG is often approached by other cultural organisations and local authorities that want to use art in public spaces to engage residents in their living environment. The challenges faced by these parties are how to achieve representation and how to organise the participation process. With regard to the representation of local heritage, the question arises as to how design power can be optimally deployed and how justice can be done to the diversity of local stories and changing perspectives on local history.

By following and clarifying the process that BWG uses to create new murals, implicit knowledge is explicitly recorded and shared. This enables other cultural organisations to work on increasing resident involvement and creating social impact. This project assumes that the creative process continues after a cultural product has been created, as new meanings are constantly being assigned to it, keeping the demand for participation and representation relevant after completion.

The project aims to develop tools that enable cultural creators to assess and improve representation in their co-creative process.

Societal issue
Murals are appreciated but also criticized forms of urban culture. Questions can be asked whose story is told, and who is involved in creating the process. Attention towards co--creation and representation is key.

Benefit to society
Insights that will be gained by means of this project:
1. How are residents involved in the various stages of the mural design process?
2. How do new residents relate to the visual and narrative aspects of the murals?
The results from observations, interviews and focus groups provide insight into the working principles of BWG's approach. Based on this, we distil insights that we translate into a tool for evaluating co-creative projects and their outcomes.