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Awards

CreaTures

Nine dimensions - ways to talk about creative practice and change. Three boxes. the top box is outlined in yellow with three animal images and the text "Changing meanings, embodying, learning, imagining" written in it. The middle box is outlined in purple with three animal images and the text "Changing connections, caring, organizing, inspiring" written it in. The bottom box is outlined in green with three images of animals and the text "Changing power, co-creating, empowering, subverting" written in it.

Moving to more resilient and flourishing futures requires more than policy implementation or providing scientific and technical knowledge. Climate change is a cultural challenge and responses are needed that speak to cultural processes. Creative practices are currently underused in the urgent task of changing cultures towards sustainability and are perceived only as means of engagement or communication.


To better understand the potential role of creative practice Verture engaged in a three year EU funded collaborative project. Creative practitioners and researchers across Europe worked together to explore how to move towards more sustainable, eco-social futures.

Over the three years of the project the CreaTures Laboratory, commissioned 20 ‘experimental productions’ and in parallel, the Observatory reviewed 140 further examples of transformative creative practice. We analysed the findings to create the CreaTures Framework to set out how creative practice brings about change. This involves nine dimensions organised by three overarching categories as shown in the image above.

⦁ changing meanings
⦁ changing connections
⦁ changing power

The framework is a helpful tool that can support practitioners and policy-makers in driving positive change and which can be used at project design or evaluation stages.
Involvement in the project has strengthened our understanding of the value of creative practice – a perspective we heard during our own interviews with Scottish policy makers:

Quote from Scottish Policy person “What’s art for?’ – one of the important things about creative sector is helping us to understand what we think, why we think it and to challenge some of those thoughts in serious or in humorous ways”. It is hugely important in revealing ourselves to ourselves and in generating the storylines that people use to shape their identities and understandings of the world and how it works. For most people, that’s far more powerful than evidence and science – although, I’d defend the importance of both.”

Verture is already drawing on the learning from the project to shape other initiatives – for example the design and evaluation of Creative Climate Futures project in Glasgow.

The project team received the 2024 Ziman Award 2024 Ziman Award: CreaTures (Creative Practice for Transformational Futures) project – EASST