Visualising intercultural futures:
The role of performance in soft power.
Visualising Intercultural Futures is a multimodal performance research project examining how intercultural performance design enhances Australia’s soft power and cultural diplomacy across the Asia–Pacific. The shared challenges of uncertain environmental futures and potential polarising cultural differences in the Asia Pacific region underscore Australia’s urgent need to adapt and reconfigure the role and identity of its soft power communication practices in the region.
About the project
The project explores the intersection of Australian intercultural performance design, artist-led cultural diplomacy, and creative mobility. It addresses shared regional challenges, environmental uncertainty, changing political relationships, and polarising cultural narratives by investigating how artists and designers communicate across differences through performance.
Drawing on case studies of intercultural and trans-Indigenous collaborations, the research traces creative processes from development to presentation, mapping how these projects reach and resonate with diverse audiences locally and internationally.
Objectives
Visualising intercultural futures: new definitions of artist-led soft power
Visualising Intercultural Futures will develop new understandings of the power and influence of Australian intercultural performance to visualise shared challenges of uncertain futures in the Asia Pacific region. Tracing a series of case studies of intercultural and trans-Indigenous collaborative performance projects through development and presentation stages across a diversity of inter-related audiences and publics the project will identify and position artist led initiatives to visualise intercultural futures in our region and measure their impact and reach internationally.
Visualising intercultural futures: new visual literacies in intercultural production design
Simultaneously tracing the identification, development and implementation of perceptual and cultural literacies applied in new intermedial and collaborative composition the project will revision excellence in Australian production design practices and disseminate them for diverse community and industry application. While the overarching foreign policy challenges I address are relational and strategic, the methodologies of this project offer technical and formal means for realising excellence in arts-led (inter)cultural diplomacy through the practices of ‘visualising’ in live performance.
Visualising intercultural futures: new artistic research methodologies
This project will research, demonstrate and create new networks for artistic practice-led research methodologies. Following an international survey of leading sites of artistic research in live/intermedial performance, the project will develop and share best-practice artistic research methodologies with a range of interrelated publics, including regional communities, arts industries, academic institutions and audiences in the Asia Pacific region.
Impact
By connecting theories of interculturalism with the practical realities of cultural diplomacy, Visualising Intercultural Futures reframes performance as a key instrument of Australia’s soft power. The project demonstrates how artists generate new perceptual and cultural literacies that strengthen intercultural understanding and creative exchange across the Asia–Pacific.
It contributes to national and regional policy debates on the role of the arts in diplomacy, develops platforms for artistic collaboration and research, and enhances Australia’s ability to engage meaningfully with diverse audiences through performance.
- Funding body: Australian Research Council – Future Fellowship
- Research area: Performance Studies
- Contact: Rachael Swain