Chutataweesawas, Sirikoy & Tanchareon, Sumate: Using Participatory Arts as a Tool for Environmental Improvement in Slum Community, Bangkok, Thailand
Participatory arts is an artistic process to facilitate and allow viewers to involve within the artistic creation of both, interaction and partial individual creation in a single or diverse artist’s/artists work. This form of practicing the art is used as a tool to develop engagement of people participating. This article aims to explain methods and how to use an active artistic approach to create awareness and reduce the social problems, as the idea each community involving and associating the process/project. Khlong Lat Phrao 41, is a slum community in Bangkok that was examined by experimenting with artistic activities to raise the involvement and awareness of the community in the environmental solutions. The concept of Participatory in the art activities were designed in order to experiment with three different age groups. Children and young adults, middle age and elderly. All of them were given the unique opportunity to reflect their worldview and desire of their hopes and ideas improve their community through any form of arts. Those process were analyzed to understand the motivation and limitation factors that are affecting the success of participants for the arts in slum community. The results showed that the art processes itself with the form of activities will have ways to develop a mental health and avoiding misbehavior, especially the adolescents. The challenging factors associated with communicating, engaging and continuing of activities that lead to sustainability. The approach of success must include the understand of contextual culture and social issues to find needs and to fill the gap in community that has to be developed, the establishment of alliance networks in the area of both, public and private sectors. Finally, creating ultimately sustainability both in physical and psychological aspects in order to create the change agents within the community to inspire other communities in Thailand.