A diagnosis of advanced cancer can be described as an unexpected disruption of someone’s life story, an experience of contingency.1 To address an experience of contingency, a new sense of direction ...and coherence in life needs to be found. One’s story of life needs to be rewritten, which requires creative thinking. This process may be supported by a specific art-perception method: Art-Based Learning. Art-Based Learning is a step-wise process of observing an artwork, creating a new narrative related to this artwork, and connecting this narrative to the personal situation.2 Art-Based Learning is designed to stimulate creative thinking through four steps: 1. Formulation of a personal question. 2. Observation of details of an artwork. 3. Imagination of a story based on the artwork. 4. Sharing the art-perception experience and reflection on the link with the personal question with a fellow participant. We aimed to explore how persons with advanced cancer could benefit from Art-Based Learning to deal with contingency experiences and stimulate meaning-making.
The author adopts a comparative perspective, juxtaposing two epistemic modes: hard sciences and performance studies. She analyses her own participation in the Theatre as an Enriched Environment ...practice-as-research project (2013), run by the Department of Art History and Performing Arts in co-operation with the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology of Sapienza University in Rome, which involved formerly incarcerated people on probation and/or post-release. Her situated experience illustrates the constraints of methodologies predicated on psychological tests and surveys as epistemic tools, which usually perform what has already been established within predefined procedures and research protocols. Camuti’s critique is directed at the essentialist aspects of these methodologies, as well as their political implications, especially given that the results of this research are supposed to reinforce the Italian system of funding in arts and culture. Moreover, she demonstrates potential gains of her research method, which less aims to provide measurable and scalable results than to unveil the epistemological productivity of situated knowing, both in the former prisoners and their instructors and facilitators.
