A critical retrospective on whiteness in Possible Worlds video artwork

The chapter examines the communally and interculturally constructed video work Possible worlds (Mäkiranta and Escudeiro 2017) in terms of its arts-policy meanings related on whiteness, living environments and youth. The video art work consists of seven episodes relating to the living environments of young women residing in different parts of Europe. The aim is to consider what kinds of meanings these young women produce related on the places they inhabit, and how the critical perspective on whiteness could challenge the ways how the knowledge of the place has been produced in the video art work. The foundation of the chapter is arts-based research, where the artist-researcher is a participant in constructing the content of the art in collaboration with the human subjects of the study, and in which the production of the art intrinsically relates to both the research methodology and the presentation of results. The chapter draws on experiences of inhabiting a white world as a white, and explores how taking whiteness under a critical retrospective might produce new ways of understandings of living conditions produced in the video art.

Keywords: art-based research; whiteness; communal art; ‘new’-materialism; young people; interculturalism; gender; social engagement; plurality