Radical Creativities: Cultivating Cross-Fertilized Knowledge
What if the boundaries between academic research, cultural practices, and art could dissolve into a shared space of inquiry? Radical Creativities is a not-for-profit editorial project initiated by the KEA–European Affairs team that invites essays, artworks, films and more to explore how cultural and scientific knowledges can inform one another. For creatives, students of management of the arts, and young professionals, this initiative offers a quietly bold model of scholarship: one that values peer-reviewed rigour alongside experimental formats, and that cultivates a mindset of connecting theory and practice, of working across disciplines. Engaging with Radical Creativities could enrich your thinking on cultural strategy, deepen your appreciation for tacit modes of knowledge and open doors to roles where creative leadership and interdisciplinary fluency are essential.
We hear from Lorenzo Biferale, Federica Rubino, and María Ruigómez Eraso as they share their vision.
In the cultural and technological realm(s), the intersection of art and science is increasingly becoming a recurring topic, often framing them as two different but complementary languages that can shed light on one another. However, their relationship is frequently one of subordination and dependency.
The liberal arts, as understood today, are historically rooted in the Renaissance and developed through the nineteenth century as an integrated vision of knowledge, encompassing the beaux arts, belles lettres, history, philosophy, mathematics, natural sciences, and emerging social sciences. Initially, these disciplines were interconnected, offering a holistic understanding of human experience.
However, as methodologies advanced and new subjects emerged, academic fields became increasingly specialized, leading to a fragmentation of knowledge. This narrowing of focus, while contributing to intellectual progress, has also distanced disciplines from broader societal concerns, as well as from interdisciplinary dialogue.
Contemporary societal issues, including climate change, global poverty, and loss of natural resources, are increasingly understood as complex or “wicked problems”. These require reconsideration of (in)formal rules, dominant ways of thinking and doing, problem solving and resource management, as these are in many ways part of the problem. In response, the twentieth century saw a growing emphasis on integrative disciplines aimed at reconnecting knowledge across fields and ensuring its practical application in enriching human life.
To work with this tension is not to reduce it, but to expand it, broadening the spectrum of the apparent contrast between theory and research practice by exploring the results of their cross-fertilisation; understood not as a way of bridging the gap between theory and practice but as self-standing process of research derived from the combination of diverse knowledges and practices.
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43).
Cross-fertilization refers to the interdisciplinary combinations of different knowledge and technologies [that we intend as practices] that occurs through collaboration between multiple disciplines, institutions, and organisations, fostering knowledge exchange, innovation, and technology convergence.
In other words, what if we try to refocus the debate from what can art tell us about scientific knowledge? to where can cross-fertilised practices lead us? It has often been thought that to bring the creative and the scientific together it is necessary to express the indeterminate aspects of nature and human existence with determinate means of expression.
Without the presumption of defining what knowledge is, we recognise that in the context in which we operate, it takes shape along a spectrum with two extremes: explicit knowledge (academic, written, codified, and described through words and images) and tacit knowledge (artistic, transferred through experience, often relational and embedded in objects).
Illustration of Möbius strip
With Radical Creativities, we aim at bringing forward the interaction between these two types of knowledge, embodied in the scientific/academic and the cultural/artistic, by stating the urgency to break this dichotomic approach.
Our domain of action is culture and creativity, whether by choice or vocation, and it is within the diverse range of people and projects that operate with/through/thanks to culture and creativity that we position ourselves. The driving force behind Radical Creativities stems from a series of questions. Questions to which we do not claim to have definitive answers, but which help define and guide the project’s actions. The first, and perhaps the most ambitious one:
What is Knowledge?
While we acknowledge the complexity of this question, we borrow a definition that resonates most with us:
"Work done with the intention to produce knowledge for use by others." (Stappers & Giaccardi, 2014)
From here, we move to our second question:
Who is the 'other'?
We believe the 'other' includes everyone who engages with culture and creativity with awareness and purpose of building and expanding knowledge, whether in academia, cultural practice, or artistic expression.
The first action we want to perform with Radical Creativities refers to the following question:
What would happen if we legitimised the cross-fertilisation of diverse practices of knowledge creation?
It’s from these premises, and with the aim of inquiring and experimenting around these questions, that Radical Creativities moves its actions. A new not-for-profit editorial project launched by the KEA - European Affairs team that aims at bridging the silos in which knowledge creation on cultural and creative practices is currently constrained. Academic research, cultural practice and art are not three separate worlds, but rather different ways to interpret, understand and assimilate the same reality.
“When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case [...] He does not separate thinking from doing, ratiocinating his way to a decision which he must later convert to action. Because his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built into his inquiry.” (Schön, 1983)
In the project’s name, we use ‘Creativity’ in the plural, emphasising the need to legitimise a plurality of practices and histories, bringing them together and letting them mutually cross-fertilise each other, bringing together the “thinking” and the “doing”. We believe that in times of “wicked problems” this is necessary to reconnect the advancement of knowledge to broad societal concerns, without criticising the specialisation and fragmentation of knowledge but moving on another space, one of cross-fertilisation of practices.
Wassily Kandinsky, Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles (1913).