The Creative Co-Production (CCP) is a model for collaborative artistic, scientific, and institutional teamwork, developed specifically for engagements with contentious cultural heritage. Developed by Tal Adler in 2015, the CCP addresses the limitations of traditional short-term artistic interventions often commissioned and hosted by heritage institutions. Unlike these brief engagements, the CCP fosters long-term, multidisciplinary cooperation among artists, researchers, heritage custodians, and affected communities to pursue significant and sustainable transformations in the ways contentious histories are interpreted and disseminated.
The CCP model was first implemented in the framework of the TRACES (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts – from Intervention to Co-Production) project that received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme from 2016 to 2019. Under this framework, Adler set up and coordinated five CCP teams, which over a period of three years, engaged with difficult heritages encompassing different social, political and geographical contexts.
Around these five CCPs, the TRACES consortium, spread across 11 partners in 10 countries in Europe, explored different aspects of the CCPs’ work such as artistic methods, ethnographic reflections, pedagogical affordances, and impacts on contentious collections. Adler was also a member of one of the five CCPs, Dead Images, which brought his ten-year engagement with two anthropological collections at the Natural History Museum Vienna to completion.
The work of TRACES and its five CCPs was brought together in the open-access publication Contentious Cultural Heritages and Arts: A Critical Companion (2021). Adler contributed ‘The Creative Co-Production: An Experimental Model for Artistic Engagements with Contentious Cultural Heritage’; ‘Dead Images: Facing the History, Ethics and Politics of European Skull Collections’, with Linda Fibiger, John Harries, Joan Smith, Anna Szöke and Maria Teschler-Nicola; and ‘Reflexive Photography and the Transformation of Shock: An Interview’, with John Harries.
TRACES was funded under the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, Grant Agreement No. 693857.
Consortium partners:
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt , Austria; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany; University of Oslo, Norway; Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland; Hosman Durabil, Romania; Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria; University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Jagiellonian University, Poland; Ulster University, United Kingdom; Domestic Research Society, Slovenia.
Creative Co-Productions:
Absence as Heritage, Mediaș
Awkward Objects of Genocide, Kraków
Casting of Death, Ljubljana
Dead Images, Vienna / Berlin / Edinburgh
Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison, Belfast