Claudia Zeiske frames socially engaged art in rural contexts as a methodological and ethical encounter that transcends disciplinary boundaries, proposing a dialogic model where artist and community co-create both process and meaning, unlike top-down cultural policies or extractive research, Zeiske’s approach emphasizes relational ethics, long-term commitment, and situated knowledge, fieldwork here becomes not a means to an aesthetic product but an ontological act of transformation—for both the place and those involved, the text details projects facilitated by Deveron Projects in Scotland, where the town is seen as the site and source of artistic practice, and walking, cooking, and storytelling become critical tools for embedding practice in lived experience, the idea of “the town is the venue” reflects a shift from institutional spaces to everyday rural geographies, foregrounding embeddedness over exhibition, this ethos challenges prevailing narratives of rural deficit by embracing interdependency, care, and slowness as core values, rather than mere data collection, the artist engages in a form of participatory witnessing, building trust and co-producing meaning across social and cultural divides, Zeiske cautions against romanticization or instrumentalization of the rural, advocating instead for reflexive negotiation, where the artist’s position is continually interrogated in relation to the community and territory, ultimately, transformational fieldwork reframes the rural as a space of epistemic richness and artistic co-agency, where the boundary between researcher, practitioner, and inhabitant is deliberately blurred in favor of shared authorship and long-duration dialogue, thus, rural socially engaged art becomes a practice of world-making—critical, affective, and infrastructural.
Zeiske, C. (n.d.). Transformational Fieldwork. Deveron Projects.
