Arts, culture and creativity can make us aware of climate change, foster mutual understanding and social cohesion, contribute to democratic citizenship through fostering dialogue, increase people’s well-being, and can make marginalised groups feel celebrated and gain a sense of empowerment.

UNICART applies artistic methods and artistic thinking to develop the UNIC project, its research daring, its pedagogy, and its impact, with the broader goal of drawing upon arts and culture to contribute in solving key societal challenges.

UNIC's seven cross-cutting Thematic Lines are interlocking collaborative structures that establish relations between faculties of our universities around specific areas of post-industrial transition.

Topics covered by UNIC's thematic lines include health and wellbeing, sustainability, resilience and digitization, security, inclusion, entrepreneurship, and arts. They are communities of researchers and educators within UNIC that provide the contents for UNIC’s innovation in education, engagement, and cooperation capacities. Find out more about our Thematic Lines and get involved!

Arts, culture and creativity illuminate our thought, generate meaning, create social conversations, and help us lead satisfying and fulfilling lives. The arts fertilise the imagination and help us aspire to alternative futures. To live life without a sense pf meaning can lead to distress, anxiety, depression, and despair. To live life with imagination can nourish hope and create social solutions. The imaginable can become possible.

How UNICArt Works

Artistic methodologies and artistic thinking provide different ways of reflecting, problem-solving, and generating action. They provide new ways of generating and analysing data, of working within other humans in relationships of creative intensity, of finding unusual solutions to complex problems, and they may give voice to traditionally silenced and/or minoritized viewpoints and identities, challenging society and institutions, and engaging with non-verbal and non-academic forms of knowledge creation. UNICArt's core thematic activities draw on three strands:

Blended Intensive Programmes – introducing artistic methodologies in dialgue between artistic and non-arts (PhD) students.

Artistic thinking training – imagination, improvisation, and alternative means of concretization of ideas and planning for non-artists and policymakers.

Engaged Research Labs – engaged arts-based research with local communities and policymakers to tackle societal challenges.

Current Activities

TL7 has recently organised a two-day immersive workshop How Artistic Thinking, Artistic Intelligence, and Speculative Design Can Help - a full afternoon of inspiration, dynamism, and innovative thinking is planned to explore the intersection of artistic methodologies for decision making, communication, and social action while developing hands-on exercises to spark the imagination in ways that go beyond standard workshop practice. Here TL7 collaborated with members of WP 2 and 3 and representatives of the City of Rotterdam.

TL7 is planning to organize a first BIP at UCC in early December 2025. While funding confirmation is pending until May 2025, we are expecting PhDs and advanced Master's students from a range of European locations to learn to apply artistic research and creation methodologies to urban challenges in new ways. Students will be guided through a range of methods for data gathering, for exploring the creative potential of spaces, and then they will co-designing (in small groups) concepts for revealing the hidden histories of public spaces in the city. They will focus on bringing the diversity and the unsung voices of Cork’s past and present into dialogue with wider culture through their concepts for intervention. Through so doing, students from the arts themselves will refine their methodological approaches, and students from outside the arts will learn new ways of incorporating artistic methodologies into their wider research projects. This concept – the next iteration of the Public Arts Garage (conceived by Martin Leibeinger at Bauhaus University Weimar) will be developed and refined from earlier models delivered in Barcelona and Rennes.