Artists in the city. Another way of looking at artists’ studios (original) (raw)
Brussels Studies, 2013
La revue scientifique électronique pour les recherches sur Bruxelles / Het elektronisch wetenschappelijk tijdschrift voor onderzoek over Brussel / The e-journal for academic research on Brussels Collection générale | 2013 Inside and outside the city: an outline of the geography of visual artists in Brussels (19th-21st centuries) Dans et hors la ville : esquisse d'une géographie des artistes plasticiens à Bruxelles (19 e -21 e siècles) Binnen en buiten de stade: schets van een geografie van de beeldend kunstenaars in Brussel (19 e -21e eeuw)
The use of cultural amenities as a tool for strategic planning and the incorporation of the symbolic value of culture by capitalist modes of production have been widely studied. At the same time, debates surrounding the emerging concepts of creative economy and industries have fostered economic development strategies promoting clusters of creative activities. The case of the Territoire de la culture et de la création, in a Paris suburb, illustrates an hybridisation of these two kinds of strategies. As we will explain, the promotion of creative activities (mainly film industries) within the frame of a large urban project should not be seen as an economic strategy but as a planning strategy. Here, supporting creative industries is not this urban project’s goal but its tool. It is a means to give value to a brownfield area, before launching a large and expensive urban project requiring private investors.
Leipzig's visual artists as actors of urban change (MSc Thesis)
This paper looks at the role of visual artists for urban change in Leipzig through the study of artist’s livelihoods and their engagement with the city in form of urban pioneering and professional development. Visual artists are actors of urban change in Leipzig because they share a sense of place attachment and common identity with the city. This leads to the attraction and retention of artists who are expanding and diversifying the existing cultural economy. Visual artists along with their exhibition and house projects have visible impact on the re-urbanisation of the city and the gentrification of specific neighbourhoods. This paper adapts previously identified city attraction factors to the group of visual artists to identify specific processes that govern their urban and economic positions at a transition from higher education to professional artistic practice. Through qualitative methods, this research articulates causation, tensions and contradictions that describe the livelihoods of visual artists within a complex contextual realm between artistic autonomy and an expanding neo-liberal field.
Pushing Borders. Cultural workers in the restructuring of post-industrial cities. PhD thesis
2017
This research explores the agency and positioning of cultural workers in the restructuring of contemporary cities. This positioning is ambiguous. Cultural workers often lead precarious professional lives, yet their significant symbolic and cultural capital is widely mobilised in the service of neoliberal urban restructuring, including ‘creative city’ flagship developments and gentrification. But cultural workers’ actual agency, their reactions to urban processes that exploit their presence, and their relations to other urban social groups, are poorly understood and hard to decipher. This thesis addresses these issues through three articles. Paper I examines a process of artist-led gentrification ongoing in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. It shows that artists, gallerists and other members of the local art scene contribute to sustaining gentrification through their everyday practices and discourses. The gentrification frontier is constructed on an everyday level as a transitional space and time in the scene members’ lives. Gentrification is de-politicised by discursively underplaying its conflictual components of class and racial struggle. Forms of resistance to gentrification amongst scene members are found, but they appear to be sector-specific and exclusive. Finally, scene members tend to fail at establishing meaningful relationships with long-time residents. Paper II brings the perspectives of long-time residents in Bushwick to the forefront. Examination of the emotional and affectual components of displacement reveals that these aspects are as important as material re-location to understanding displacement and gentrification. The encounter with newcomers’ bodies in neighbourhood spaces triggers a deep sense of displacement for long-time residents, evoking deep-rooted structural inequalities of which gentrification is one spatial expression. Paper III examines the case of Macao, a collective mobilisation of cultural workers in Milan, Italy. There, cultural workers have mobilised against neoliberal urbanism, top-down gentrification, corruption, growing labour precarity and other regressive urban and social issues. The paper considers the distinctive resources, aesthetic tactics and inaugurative practices mobilised and enacted in the urban space by Macao and it argues that by deploying their cultural and symbolic capital, cultural workers can reframe the relations between bodies, space and time, and hence challenge power structures. Cultural workers might not have the power to determine the structural boundaries and hierarchies that organize urban society, including their own positioning in it. Nonetheless, through their actions and discourses and subjectification processes, they can reinforce or challenge those borders.
Young artists and the development of artistic quarters in Polish cities
2014
The phenomenon of artistic quarters has been explored by many researchers interested in the spatial behaviours of artists in North American and Western European cities. Their analyses have often focused on the impact of this occupational group on transformations of selected urban areas: the arrival of artists as pioneers in degraded, problem neighbourhoods and the evolution of those neighbourhoods, which then attract more established artists, followed by creative professionals and non-creative gentrifiers. As over time the built environment, functions, cultural, gastronomic offer and ambiance of such areas change significantly, their progressive mainstreaming and commercialization prompt some artists to venture into new districts and spaces. The article first offers a review of existing findings with respect to artistic quarters and their transformations. The discussion of the possible stages of development of artistic quarters present in literature is followed by the application of this theoretical framework in the context of Polish cities using the examples of Krakow and Katowice. These significant regional capitals represent two major types of urban centres in Poland: a city with medieval roots, and a city which emerged during the 19th-century industrialisation process. The phases of evolution of the artistic quarters in both cities are analysed by examining the spatial perceptions of students of artistic majors. The analysis shows that the transformations of urban spaces in terms of their functions and perceptions as artistic quarters are not as straightforward and linear as earlier studies might suggest. Krakow’s more vibrant artistic life and its historic, concentric urban structure, combined with strong commercial pressures, are conducive to the development of new artistic quarters, although its traditional city centre continues to some extent to maintain its position on the artistic map of the city. In contrast, in Katowice the chaotic spatial structure of the heart of this historic industrial region makes the flow of artists more difficult and less likely, as they tend to concentrate in a poorly delineated area of the inner city. In addition, as the case studies reveal, spatial choices of artists are not only dependent on a city’s development path and its built environment but are also to a significant extent shaped by the diverse artistic backgrounds of its creatives and a host of factors linked with post-socialist transformation and neoliberal urban policies.
The Feral, the Art Object and the Social (doctoral thesis)
2017
This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice. In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres. Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall. The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover. The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.
Generationing cultural quarters: the temporal embeddedness of relational places
Urban Geography, 2021
Cultural quarters concentrate and embed cultural and artistic activities, services, and networks in place, yet they are neither singular nor discrete entities. Within cities, cultural quarters exist in multiple temporal and spatial relations. Building on our existing work on thepolitical, organizational, social, ephemeral, and spatial forms of embeddedness of cultural quarters (POSES Star Framework), this paper focuses on temporal embeddedness. It argues that a temporally-sensitive analysis of cultural quarter embeddedness, and the transposition of developmental psychology notions of generationing and birth order, can advance urban geographical understandings of the interdependencies of sites of cultural production and consumption within cities. A comparative study of four proximate German cultural quarters in former industrial sites in West Leipzig – Baumwollspinnerei, Tapetenwerk, Westwerk, and Kunstkraftwerk – illustrates how generationing showcases cultural quarters as relational places.
Comic Art in Museums, 2020
Except from my 2020 UPM book Comic Art in Museums: Table of Contents, Introduction with images, Contributor Bios.
From a Jewish Quarter into a Creative District
The seventh district of Budapest once was home to the Jewish community, but World War II left the once flourishing Jewish neighbourhood with abandoned houses and poorlymaintained buildings, which were squatted in the early 2000s by ruin pubs and subsequently attracted and were populated by underground artists and cultural creatives ‐ now the area hosts subcultural1entrepreneurs, creative communities and a lively nightlife concentrated around the unique venues of the city called „ruin pubs”. This paper aims to illustrate the present dynamics and characteristics of this creative urban environment through a case study of grassroots, small‐scale fashion designers and retailers. By focusing on these space users and their relations we intend to give insight into the buzz that whirls around in this area and to reveal part of its fascinating socio‐cultural history at the same time, since the present creative ecology feeds upon its unique past.
Creative Districts around the World
2014
The 500th anniversary of one of the historic creative districts of the world, Bairro Alto, in Lisbon (Portugal) served as a catalyst for the publication of this interactive e-book. In a journey that starts in the heart of the Bairro, several authors and artists take us on a journey to different creative districts around the globe. Creative Districts around the world is a snapshot of the dynamic changes taking place in very different cities, such as London, New York, Johannesburg or Melaka.