Sustaining life on earth: arts-based responses to the lived experience of COVID-19

This paper describes the journey of a group of six international arts-based researchers who convened in 2019 at the ECQI for a Gamechanger event. The goal was to create a transdisciplinary and transglobal group advocating for the visibility, accessibility, and valuation of Arts-Based Research (ABR). The mission was driven by the desire to contribute to the understanding of underlying beyond-words human intersubjective phenomena and resulting collective behaviors that influence our world but elude more traditional research methods. Conceptualized within an historical and contemporary socio-political context of turbulence, oppression, and inequity, the aspiration was that ABR might transcend the usual rhetoric exposing the trauma and toxicity while enhancing empathic, compassionate, and meaningful social discourse essential to creative reformative social justice. Thus, the Arts-Based Research (ABR) Global Consortium was formed. With the formation of our consortium and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to begin our first research project “Sustaining Life on Earth: Arts-Based Responses to the Lived Experience of COVID-19”, which was initiated in 2020 and completed in 2022. Nineteen individuals volunteered to participate as co-researchers, alongside the six member core team, submitting their arts-based and narrative responses to the project. The core team guiding the project collected and organized the submissions while simultaneously entering into an immersive, iterative, dynamic arts-based and dialogic process with the data and each other. In these immersive processes, we considered a priori themes of emotional impact, social framing, and aesthetic power of the art and narrative data as well as opening to emergent themes. Analysis included narrative and sensorial-based coding, responsive art making, collaborative and individual multi-genre memos, and reflections on all submissions. The final result of the project is an artsbased and performative piece using video and interactive gallery venues. The arts-based results of this project captured the sensory, embodied, and emotional experiences of the evolving phases of the pandemic which resonated with the co-researchers and multiple audiences. These phases include initial anxiety and panic; reflection and creativity; and resilience. The results of the project were presented in arts-based form at the ECQI in 2022. In this presentation, we invited attendees on our journey to walk with us through the innovative conceptualization, construction, methodological practices, collaborative and individual reflections, analysis, and final synthesis processes of this project.