Stories from the Sea: Working with the SDGs in a Community-Based Art Workshop

This paper presents a series of community-based art workshops held in the summer of 2019 in Icelandic coastal villages on the theme Stories of the Sea. The collaborative project was aimed at providing meaningful aesthetic experiences based on contemporary art approaches that might not otherwise be readily available in peripheral communities. It was funded by the Icelandic Children’s Fund and attracted over 500 participants. Its underlying rationale was that art projects and artworks can be used to promote awareness of vices and virtues in order to open up ethical questions and criteria for practice concerning issues of sustainability. It thus focused on providing inspiring learning settings in which the transformative power of creativity might be used to raise environmental awareness, including the protection of the oceans. The pedagogical approaches used included participatory pedagogy, critical place-based learning and an emphasis on working with tacit knowledge already available in these localities. The project’s methodology was based on the five key dimensions of sustainable pedagogy (content, perspectives, process, context and design) while its findings were analyzed using the approach of art-based action research.