For the past decade, Engrenage Noir / LEVIER—together with hundreds of artists and activists associated with dozens of community groups and organizations—has cultivated the practice of socio-politically engaged art. Affirming Collaboration communicates the joys and challenges encountered in co-creative community and humanist activist art while advancing our understanding of its ethics and aesthetics.

The first bilingual publication to go into such depths about the problematics of community and humanist activist art, Affirming Collaboration brings together experiential testimony and theoretical analysis with texts by Kim Anderson, Jorge Goia, Petra Kuppers, Vivian Labrie, Louise Lachapelle, Eve Lamoureux, Nisha Sajnani and Bob W. White. In addition to the accompanying DVD compilation entitled Documenting Collaboration, interviews, project descriptions and essays convey practical information and invite critical reflection about how collaborative art develops and sustains healthy communities, even in this time of rampant individualism and global systemic inequalities.