Federica Cologna
Programme:
Art - PhD/MPhil
Start date:
Sep-21
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
ART AS COLLECTIVE ACTION: Towards an Alternative Future for Democracy
Biography
I am an artist researcher working at the intersection of socially engaged artistic practice and feminist theory. I am currently doing a doctorate as a College Research Award holder at the University of Edinburgh. My project, titled ART AS COLLECTIVE ACTION: Towards an Alternative Future for Democracy, explores through feminist practice-led research how socially engaged, community-embedded art practices enable dialogue, expand public imagination, create solidarity and re-imagine civic engagement.
I hold a trilingual (English, Italian, German) bachelor’s degree in Design and Art from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (UNIBZ) and a master's degree in Modern and Contemporary Art: History, Curating and Criticism from The University of Edinburgh. In addition, while completing my BA I studied for one academic year at the Barcelona School of Design (ELISAVA) with the Erasmus+ mobility scholarship.
Since March 2022, I am a member of the Community Wellbeing Collective (C.W.C.), a group of people from, and connected to, Wester Hailes working together to practice communal wellbeing and question how to create spaces for it.
Examples of my work include scores, editorial projects, installations, workshops, and choreographies that I shared at community and art spaces, museums, online publishing platforms, and during festivals and public programmes:
I am researching how socially-engaged, community-embedded art practices enable wellbeing, cohesion, civic engagement; in particular how these art practices mobilise and assemble people and create allyship and change.
In my doctoral project I am carrying out feminist artistic research as a member of the Community Wellbeing Collective (C.W.C.) that entails collective learning and action, field-based research, participatory performative exercises and which is developed in dialogue with contextual research and theoretical discourses analysis.