Vulnerable Spaces of Coproduction: Confronting Predefined Categories through Arts Interventions

Collaboration between researchers and artists is often held as particularly promising to enhance cross-cultural understanding. In this article, two researchers and an artist reflect on the potentials, as well as the pitfalls, of art-based interventions in integration of migrants. Through the performing arts youth project Here I Am, we discuss coproduction methodologies. We emphasize the discomfort in confronting the stereotypes inherent in our perspectives and categories. Exploring how various encounters among the researchers, artist, and participants in the performing arts project challenge the prevailing perspectives, we argue that art interventions have the potential to bring knowledge production beyond predefined categories and explanations. This requires moving beyond our comfort zones and entering vulnerable spaces of improvisation, where new understanding and “grammars” can be coproduced. This article shows how the reflections of such spaces alter the research project and the aims of the art intervention, including our understanding of integration.