Projects

Aart van der Maas’s socio-cultural PhD research focuses on the relationship between the inclusive city and the concept ‘culture common’ – a term that refers to collective, cultural practices initiated by citizens, without direct involvement of the market and/or government. His research aims to determine if and how community cultural centers in Utrecht might contribute to a more inclusive city by working with the concept ‘culture common’ and so-called commoning principles.

His research is situated in the urban context of Utrecht, where five community cultural centers at eight different locations have been established as artistic citizen’s initiatives since the 1990s. Over the years, these cultural institutions have functioned as an important link between neighborhoods, residents, the market and urban and regional cultural policies. The emergence of such community cultural centers corresponds to a broader international trend: urban cultural and arts policy is increasingly seen as an instrument to achieve the objectives of social cohesion, inclusion and urban renewal (see for example: Merle, 2002; Van Erven, 2013; Lees & Melhuish, 2015; Moulaert, MacCallum, Mehmood & Hamdouch, 2015; De Vos & Verhagen, 2017). As such, the five community cultural centers in Utrecht are viewed as the ‘cultural infrastructure’ of the city. They are therefore given the responsibility to respond to social developments such as the rise of urban diversity (Cultuurnota 2017-2020). After all, Utrecht is increasingly becoming a city of ‘superdiversity’ where concepts such as assimilation and immigration no longer suffice, since there is no longer a clearly defined majority group (Crul, 2016; Oosterlynk, Verschraegen & Van Kempen, 2019).

Up till now, research into cultural interventions (such as community art) and associated (inter)national cultural policies, has focused primarily on “socialization and binding cohesive behaviour” (Matarasso, 1997; Otte, 2015; Otte & Gielen, 2019). As a result, it remains unclear how and to what precise extent cultural interventions and projects contribute to social inclusion and social renewal in superdiverse urban areas (see, among others: Lees & Melhuish, 2015; Otte & Gielen, 2019). Moreover, there is a considerable amount of international criticism of social and cultural projects managed top-down by the government. Structural changes only come about through bottom-up and commons-driven initiatives of various groups of people (see, among others: Moulaert, MacCallum, Mehmood & Hamdouch, 2015; Dockx & Gielen, 2018). This doctoral study therefore seeks to examine how community cultural centers might offer a lasting infrastructure for the initiation and/or the facilitation of so-called ‘commoners’. This requires research into the relationship between the government, community cultural centers and commoners’ initiatives. Here, the government probably serves in a facilitating role to help develop the framework within which forms of self-government are made possible.

The central research question is:

How can community cultural centers work with the concepts ‘culture common’ and ‘commoning principles’ to contribute to an inclusive city of Utrecht?

By way of such theoretical concepts as ‘culture common’ and the ‘(culturally) inclusive society’, this doctoral study aims to provide an innovative, scientific basis for the study of the function of community cultural centers and the implications of this function for (municipal) governmental policies. In various articles and papers [see for example: Gilbert, 2014; Gielen, 2013, Otte, 2015 and Otte & Gielen, 2019) the authors point out that the current (policy-based) concept of “community” is problematic, since it increasingly emphasizes a “we-feeling”, resulting in further social exclusion. A ‘common’, by contrast, should not place emphasis on shared identity. Rather, it highlights a common resource characterized by a non-hierarchical, open structure and ‘dissensus’. Dissensus within commoning processes is associated with mutual conflicts and open-ended experiments. Commons are difficult to control and commoners maintain a problematic relationship with current (municipal) policies aimed at “poldering” and consensus (Otte & Gielen, 2019; Rooijakkers, 2019).

HORIZON-CL2-2021-DEMOCRACY-01, ‘FIERCE: Feminist movements revitalizing democracy in Europe’ (2022-2025), PI for Aristotle University (coordinator vilabs.eu).

FIERCE sets out to study and revitalise the alliances between the feminist movement, civil society and political decision makers by means of a multidimensional, bottom-up and impact-oriented approach.

The project will provide an in-depth understanding of feminist and antifeminist / anti-gender movements, activities and discourses, and their impact on the institutional arena and on policy outcomes, focusing on the period between 2010-2021.  It focusses on the systematic construction of eight national case studies including Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey. It will pursue a comprehensive and cross-cutting comparative analysis based on five policy areas:

Labour market, Health & Reproductive rights, Migration, Gender-based violence, LGBTQ+ rights

The PhD research project “Disarming Design from Palestine” (2019-2024) questions how design can be a vehicle for empowerment and solidarity in oppressed realities. How can one through the practice of design develop sustainable positions in fractured societies? Building upon relations of trust and long-term involvements in Palestine, Annelys de Vet will analyze, define and design the conditions for design to have a social, political and emancipatory impact. A concrete goal is to develop, in close collaboration with local partners, new forms and platforms for design education, collaboration and exchange in Palestine, reinforcing the economic, political and artistic sustainability of designers.

​The Mottolese Archive is a research project (PhD, 2023-2027) focusing on a video archive never made public: the fifteen-years-long documentation of the local environmental struggles created by Piero Mottolese, a 70-years old former worker of Taranto’s ILVA. The largest steel-plant in Europe, ILVA was held liable for environmental and health disaster. Involved in a history of ecocide historically rooted in the systemic harm of communities and ecosystems in Southern Italy, since 2005 Taranto has been home to a civil society’s engagement of great complexity. The actual archive’s footage includes demonstrations, civil disobediences, meetings of activists, confrontations with politicians, labor strikes, personal stories, seizures of contaminated flocks and mussels and much more, in a flow of experiences embracing the history of a city. The project aims to collectively constitute the archive as a common good while exploring the intertwined layers of locality and globality in environmental justice through the lens of political ecology.

The general purpose of this project is to elucidate psychological and social risk factors for low back pain in dancers. We will explore perceived causes of low back pain in female pre-professional dancers. The novelty of this approach is the unraveling of low back pain from a multidisciplinary perspective in adolescents at risk for developing low back pain in a period of their life characterized by significant biological and psychological changes. The multidimensional nature of low back pain is widely recognized in adults, but has only rarely been studied in adolescents while the foundation of low back pain in later life is likely to start in the adolescence period. For this reason, we will examine the role of psychological (anxiety, stress, pressure to perform), social (based on the artistic biotope) and biological aspects in the development of low back pain during adolescence, a period characterized by important biological changes (maturation, etc). The qualitative methodology will allow to explore these psychological and social risk factors in more depth, as validated questionnaires to examine these topics in adolescent dancers are lacking. This will lay the foundation for fundamental prospective studies examining causes of low back pain in adolescents from a genuine biopsychosocial perspective.

Supervisors:

• Nathalie Roussel, Revalidatiewetenschappen en Kinesitherapie, Universiteit Antwerpen
• Pascal Gielen, Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, Universiteit Antwerpen
• Eric Van Breda, Revalidatiewetenschappen en Kinesitherapie, Universiteit Antwerpen

The Commons as a Pathway to a New Institutional Dynamic is a PhD research that explores how Museums and Cultural Institutions could integrate concepts from the Theory of the Commons in order to shape a new museological praxis. The study analyses the connections between the Museums in the current neoliberal affairs and the contributions from the Theory of the Commons with the aim to produce another operational and philosophical perspective on the “public services” offered by museums; generating a renovated structure in its purpose, exhibitions, and public programs.

ΗORIZON 2020, SC6 TRANSFORMATIONS 2018-2020, ‘SMOOTH: Educational Common Spaces. Passing through enclosures and reversing inequalities’

(2021-2024), PI for Aristotle University, coordinator University of Thessaly.

SMOOTH intends to introduce the emergent paradigm of the ‘commons’ as an alternative value and action system in education for children and young people. The project critically draws out the implications of the commons for refiguring education and for social change in general, on a footing of equality, sharing, participation, togetherness, caring and freedom. It sets out to study if ‘educational commons’ can operate as a catalyst for reversing inequalities through various methods such as pedagogical documentation, pedagogy of active listening, ethnography and discourse analysis.

OXOt vzw is an artists’ collective that runs on volunteers with a specific focus on socially integrating vulnerable people. Established in 2006, it runs spaces in Westerlo, Ghent, and Antwerp, pioneering the socialization of care, recovery, and peer support in Belgium. Through art, people connect, enter into dialogue more quickly, lower integration thresholds, and stimulate empowerment. We focus on equality rather than vulnerability. OXOt assumes that we all have a vulnerable side but also envisions the possibility of supporting each other. Besides the studio operation, facilitating exhibitions and performative stages, OXOt looks for other ways to prevent stigma and tries to roll out an inclusive project across national borders as well. Through an E+ grant, OXOt shares good practices with partners from Greece, Spain and Austria. These practices are shared on a website. It needs further exploration on how this website can promote an inclusive narrative through art.

Commons Lab is a grassroots, not for profit ‘socio-cultural’ organization, founded as ‘Commons Lab Antwerp’ at the end of 2017 in the city of Antwerp (Belgium). It’s an experimental lab investigating ‘commons transition’; new forms of collaborative action that are leading urban and rural areas towards new forms of participatory governance, inclusive economic growth and social innovation. It’s founded by a few active citizens who try to partner with social innovators (i.e. active citizens, city makers, digital collaboratives, urban regenerators, community gardeners, etc.), local authorities, businesses, civil society organizations, and knowledge institutions (i.e. schools, universities, cultural institutions, museums, academies, etc.). The ultimate goal is to create a more sustainable, democratic and just region.

We use different strategies and tricks to speed up local commons transitions in cities, rural areas in Flanders. We reclaim and empower (urban) commons by reframing, and creating a new awareness, understanding of what the ‘city/municipality as commons’ paradigm is about. We connect smaller and bigger revolutions. We share very actively and strategic information, tools, networks, skills, … We assembly in many different ways, online and offline, local and global. 

Commons Lab is inspired by the work of Michel Bauwens/P2P foundation,  the Co-Cities project, LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a Commons. CL is a partner in the European Commons Assembly, an international network and campaing for commoning in society and politics. CL also participates in the ‘Professional training program on urban green space management’- PROGRESS. A European exchange program for professionals and actors of the environment on the management of urban green spaces. CL is funded by the Flemish government (since 2021). 

www.commonslab.be

Projects (Commons Lab):

• Flemish Commons Congress – Het Digitaal commonscongres – 27 november 2020
• Garden streets (as commons) – www.tuinstraten.be
• Omrijk Festival (about Degrowth, commons, …) Omrijk — Commons Lab
• ‘The Right to common’ – Right to common — Commons Lab
• Food Council/policy City of Antwerp – Voedselraad Antwerpen — Commons Lab

Other projects of Koen Wynants (as active citizen/commoner):

• Spilkiekes/community garden: www.spilkiekes.be
• A church as a common – www.fundament2060.be
• Community supported beekeeping Antwerp
• Coop of community food producers – www.coop2060.be
• Collective of ‘Oude Geuze’ lovers – www.bierboot.be 
• Board member ‘Europahuis Ryckevelde’ – Europahuis Ryckevelde | Thuis in Europa

Pascal Gielen developed three thematic lines around which a range of writing, book, film and research projects are set up.

The first line Arts in Society examines the role of the arts in society. An interdisciplinary approach takes precedence, focusing both on the institutional context of the arts, such as cultural policy and organizational structures, and on the cultural, ecological, political and social role of the arts in society. Subjects such as community art, art education, art in public space, diversity, democracy, civil action, creative labor and cultural commons were discussed within this line of research and often resulted in editions in the Antennae-Arts in Society book series published by Valiz, Amsterdam (http://ccqo.eu/books). Research funded by the Fund for Scientific Research, such as ‘Sustainable Creativity in the Post-Fordist City’ or by the European Commission such as ‘Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities’, as well as research, writing and curatorial assignments such as ‘The Hybrid Artist’ (commissioned by AVANS), ‘The Art of Civil Action’, ‘Sensing Earth’ (both commissioned by the European Cultural Foundation), ‘The Constituent Museum’ (commissioned by M HKA) and ‘Common Sense’ (commissioned by the Flemish government) are part of this thematic line.

The second line Culture examines the importance and value of culture in society in a broader, often sociological sense. Research, writing and editing assignments such as ‘The Value of Culture’ (commissioned by the Flemish government and cultural policy centers), ‘No Culture, No Europe’ (commissioned by the European Cultural Foundation) and ‘The Civil Value of Socio-Cultural Acting’ (commissioned by Socius) fit within this thematic line.

A third line Sensitive Science has recently developed and is looking for a singular and tentative relationship to current events in society such as the financial crisis, government cutbacks, the corona crisis, the disappearance of urban free spaces, burn-out or war. Within this line, not only current social themes are addressed, but the writing and the form of publication itself are the subject of a quest. Opinion pieces are written within this line, film contributions are made and in the meantime the booklets ‘Nearness‘ and ‘Fragility‘ have been published.

With the 2024 elections on the way, Katrien Reist is currently investigating the notion of the ‘representation’ of the Flemish art field in the political realm. Questioning the legitimacy of the classical organisation of the so-called ‘social partners’, their hierarchical and hegemonic organisation structures, she is interested in reorganising the dynamics of classical representational bodies (i.a. working unions, network and lobby organisations, advisory boards etc.) and restructure them towards more inclusive and participatory forms, that include newly emerged voices and currently informal consultative structures, that need recognition. Aim would be to ameliorate and strengthen the relationship between politics, the governmental/ administrative bodies and the public parties/civil society and repair their relation to daily practices and realities ‘on the workflow’.Within this focus, Katrien is working on the following projects:

• SOTA 2030
  SOTA (State of the Arts) took time to rethink her internal organisation and drew a new organigram that we will bring into practice from October 2022 on. To strengthen the organisation, we set (among others) the following goals for 2022 – 2023:
  • development of a sustainable financial model for the self-run, open platform State of the Arts, starting from a system of patronage
  • development of a learning platform that guarantees the transfer of knowledge and skills within a group of SOTA volunteers. 
  • development of an online tool for direct and short term, collective deliberation with a large range of voices of supporters and other representative voices
    
    
• Representation Reshuffled
  With the prospect of the upcoming elections in 2024, there is an urgency on strengthening the sector from within. The upcoming political discourse will most predictably focus on issues of culture and identity and the cultural field needs to be prepared for being projected on, instrumentalized and recuperated. Since the start of Jambon’s legislature, the art field seems to have done a great job in resisting some of the proposed reforms and (nationalist) tendencies. Yet, if you look at how the sector and how these protests have been organised, one can only conclude that its internal deliberative structures are messy, heavily improvised, unrepresentative and non-binding. Moreover, the non-preparedness for action during the development of the new Arts Decree has been a painful example of how the sector lacks structures to overcome internal division. There is a serious need for more inclusive consultation structures, especially now that the classical forms of representation appear to be outdated and unreliable. 
  
  Possible actions:
  • Design of a new and more inclusive deliberative model for the field of art and culture
    (a project in collaboration with SOTA, Kunstenpunt, loko’s, CJM)
    Highly deliberative and outspoken by default, the field has been classically hard to unite. While politicians and the government call for a ‘united voice’ from the field of arts and culture, the sector is shattered over many different ‘representative’ bodies:lokaal cultuuroverleg (Loko’s of Gent, Antwerp, Brussels, Bruges, Leuven, Limburg) oKo, State of the Arts, Artiesten Coalitie, the various guilds, the various unions… to mention the ones in the Flemish arts field only. Widening the scope to the social cultural organisations, this list easily triples. Speaking with the Wallonian peers is yet another issue… Is it possible to unite all interests in ‘one voice’ for the arts and culture? How desirable is this, when we at the same time pursue diversity? Can we think of an organisational and deliberative model that would meet the pluriformity?
    
    
  • Citizens Assembly on Culture
    (a project in collaboration with Kunstenpunt)
    The sector would be served with a clear deliberative model to speak ‘among itself’.But next to this, the field also needs to reclaim a form of ownership on its relationship with society as a whole:the needs and desires of the people we claim to be our ‘public’. If we perceive culture and our role as cultural producers a community matter – a common if you like – we’ll need to treat it as one. A Citizens Assembly imposes itself….

PhD research (2019-2024)

Bart Caron researches the foundations, characteristics and conditions of a progressive cultural policy. The pursuit of a cultural policy – arts, heritage, social-cultural work, participation … – cuts just as much through the ideological and political fault lines as social economic policy. Although there are very different policy choices within the political spectrum (an absent or very limited versus generous support for artists and art organizations; different emphasis on art participation; a small versus important role for market forces, etc.), the difference between a conservative and progressive cultural policy is rarely or never explicitly stated.

Bart Caron was a Flemish parliament representative and chairman of the Committee for Culture, Youth, Sport and Media in the Flemish Parliament. Before that, he was head of cabinet for Culture, Youth and Sport with two ministers of the Flemish government. Previous to that, he worked as a culture officer for the City of Kortrijk, as a staff member for Culture at the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities and was coordinator of Bruges 2002 (European Capital of Culture). He is also a double bass player with various ensembles.He is the author of the books “Niet de kers op de taart. Waarom kunst- en cultuurbeleid geen luxe is,” and “Vanop de Frontlijn, Reflecties bij het cultuurbeleid” together with Guy Redig.

Cultural policy and emotional clusters in the post-global context (PhD 2017-2022)
Performing arts and emotions between top-down and bottom-up negotiations

This dissertation focuses on the role that emotions play in the negotiations between top-down cultural policymaking and bottom-up cultural practices. The two key case studies are The EU Creative Europe programme, with its Audience Development (AD) priority, and the city of Naples, with its season of the commons. In both these settings, various forms of cultural participation and civil engagement are scrutinized. Starting from the performing arts sector, I explore the mutations of these participatory practices within a heterogeneous cultural ecosystem during the period of significant global change from 2008 to 2020.

An abductive methodology (by also adopting qualitative research techniques such as autoethnography) was used, which gradually enabled the close observation of the cultural, policy, and political actors’ behaviours in the field of inquiry. It revealed the key social, political, and transformative function of emotions in power relations; in formal and informal spaces of policy negotiations; in decision-making procedures, and in the transversal alliances between top-down and bottom-up actors. I have opted to call emotional clusters these temporary informal value-driven groupings I witnessed throughout my journey, where personal issues converge, aiming to critically react to the regeneration of neoliberalism and to co-imagine the pluralistic development of cultural policy or political programmes. Emotional clusters look like a form of social adaptation which constitutes the bases of unknown and renewed spaces of resistance that perform between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic realms. Emotional clusters have demonstrated the extent to which emotions can provide us with an innovative key to analyse cultural, policy and political processes. They can be seen as a symptom of a new phase, i.e., a post-global condition which I addressed through an empirical lens, focusing on the friction between global interconnections and hyper-localisms.

This thesis is divided into four main chapters and has been inspired by, and dedicated to, all those who still believe that battles over the ‘quality of (daily) life’ are necessary, timely, and unavoidable. This means re-politicizing the public realm, to actively collaborate in the co-creation of pluralistic democratic narratives and conceiving the cultural policy process as a lively and political matter. This dissertation shows that emotions are an intrinsic part of these processes.

In the artistic doctoral study Ciné Place-Making (2018-2024), Robin Vanbesien traces, through various artistic processes and projects, different cinematic ways of making common cause with situated practices of place-making. These practices emerge within various grassroots initiatives, networks, and social movements as people resist and dismantle the oppressive spaces to which they are involuntarily confined. This resistance is a response to the enduring legacies of colonial racial capitalism.

Vanbesien explores how to work out the relationship between cinema and these place-making practices. He views cinema as a collaborative practice that allows other connections to emerge rather than reinforcing dominant meanings and subjectivities. This approach is crucial in revealing how dominant representations obscure the processes and institutions of power that differentially discriminate and dehumanize people. It’s essential to envision a cinema that begins with a refusal to conform to the language, desires, and terms of these dominant representations. From this perspective, Vanbesien examines how cinema can offer a method to view the world differently. He investigates how it can help reclaim collective desire, intensity, and imagination for those involved in place-making. He proposes ciné place-making as a way to rehearse collective imaginaries, speculating on new approaches to creating concrete places for equally livable lives and habitable futures.

How can cinema provide ways to acknowledge, reclaim, reassemble, rehearse, and redistribute the social collective body and sensory imagination of a situated practice of place-making? How to make a cinema that emerges from reassembly and recreation with assemblers who speak and act nearby these situated practices of place-making? Ciné place-making is a cinema of incompleteness. It is a kind of imperfect cinema, which initiates (new) social assemblies. How to contribute to the ongoing redistribution of such a cinema of place-making?

The study, which ran from 2018 to 2024, encompasses three artistic projects: ‘the wasp and the weather’ (2018-2020), ‘ciné assemblies’ with The Post Film Collective (2020-2023) and ‘Holding Rehearsals’ (2021-2024). These projects culminated into cinematic outcomes that involve a lens and a screen - films and video-installations - but they also would encompass ways of sharing and presenting without them, before and after – in the form of study circles, workshops, performances, assemblies, archives and installations.

The PhD project BOK (bodies of knowledge, 2018-2022) investigates how public space can be activated through artistic intervention in order to transfer non-dominant (forms of) knowledge.

How can you create a safe space within the public space for the exchange of different forms of repressed knowledge? What are artistic and political strategies to reverse the knowledge / power relations within the public domain? Which forms of performative knowledge transfer contribute to a more equal, emancipated society?

The aim of this project is to investigate existing initiatives concerning non-dominant knowledge transfer, which are therefore independent of the white patriarchal structures. In addition, this research aims to create a “space of appearance” for a pluralistic exchange of knowledge. Understanding knowledge as art and knowledge transfer as a performative act. Finally, a search is being made for a place for verbal knowledge transfer.

For more information: www.bodiesofknowledge.be

Cultural Policy Balancing the Cultural Biotope (2016-2022)

Large cities nowadays are challenged in their cultural policy by many oppositional developments. The field of art policy has changed immensely ever since the arts, as part of the welcomed and embraced creative industry, have been approached from an economic perspective. Although this perspective was, and by some still is, believed as the solution for the art sector to survive without in the end being dependent of the government, the autonomy of the artist, his practice and the intrinsic value of the arts for the city, which is a civil and a political one in the sense of giving form to society (Rancière, 2015) are at stake. According to Gielen (2016) the balance between four domains, needed for artists to be able to creatively contribute to city life in a sustainable way, has been disturbed. On the one hand, the institutions that (used to) protect the domains in which artists are able to artistically develop themselves and their practice (domestic and peers), and the domain in which artists can make their work public (civil), have changed heavily by the tendencies of globalization. The only domain that gained from these tendencies, seems to be that of the market, slowly intruding a market logic into the other domains.

In this study, it will be investigated how city policies deal with this unbalance and to what extent they are able to recover the balance and to bring the civil value of the arts and culture to the fore again.

The research of CCQO builds on the thought of Negri and Hardt (2009) that sustainable creativity needs a shared and freely accessible communality, referred to as the commons. It will be assessed if and how alternative artistic initiatives in several European cities try to build up their practice based on such a common. By interviewing these initiatives, it is and will be investigated how they manage (or not) to find the right balance in order to be able to respond to the cities appeal to their creativity. How do they relate to the city council and vice versa? What do they need from the city, other than financial means? And how can the city provide these needs? Casestudies (to be performed) are: Montaña Verde by Recetas Urbanas in Antwerp (2018), The Beach in Amsterdam, Kaapeli in Helsinki (within the Creative Europe project Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities 2018-2020), De Toren van Babel by Rooftoptiger and city poet  Maud VanHauwaert in Antwerp (2019) and De Grond der Dingen in Mechelen (2019).

The final aim of the study will be to develop, via a comparative research approach, a new ideal-typical model (or models) for cultural policy in cities.

The absurd non-linear and playful video diary (…) tells the story of (and by) Ron, who has been living for 5 years with a Aquired Brain Injury (ABI), causing him to get lost and to forget. Ron has documented his whole life in diaries and he is now writing a book about living with ABI. The moment his daughter Karina finds out that Ron forgot about her, she decides to turn his book into a film. (…) hovers between reality and a manipulation of it. We end up in an adventure about manipulating memories, visualising thoughts, wanting to fill in black holes, obsessively documenting life and about looking for a language in which we meet each other without remembering.

After (…) I will work on a graphic novel about the subjective reporter versus the servient artistic practice. I want to dive into the world of autofiction and see how story structures and dramaturgy are developed in different ways. I will talk to people who have implemented this in their work. What is their relationship between autonomous and illustrative work? Can you be of service as an artist? Are you subordinate to the structure, the system of the institute anyway? Or can the roles be reversed? And how?

The Belgium based Nadar Ensemble is a new music ensemble specialized in performing curated and integrated concerts. In this case ‘integrated’ infers that all aspects of the concert are taken into consideration. Questioning, developing, and instrumentalizing video, light and sound design (including live electronics), costuming, decor, and even personnel such as a conductor and other roles typically inherent to an ensembles’ tradition, have become an integralpart of Nadar’s and other similar ensembles’ concert programming. In this talk I will specifically lay out manners in which the musicians of Nadar Ensemble approach what they have grown to see as their broadened-instruments, including the use of live-electronics, game-controllers and newly made instruments. I will also discuss ideas surrounding the so-called ‘attacca-concert’, gestural notation, and post-instrumental practice by delving into examples such as Nadar’s event “Dead Serious” (2014), the concert program “Extensions” (2015), and our recent premiere of Michael Beil’s scenic composition Hide to Show (2021).Furthermore, I will attempt to frame the various performance practices we have developed for this relatively new evolution.

Introduction to Nadar Ensemble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwRWNXuO2CM

In ancient Greece, “Pharmakon”, was a chosen individual, who was selected through common consensus by its community. The person was either sacrificed as a means of purification for the city, or it was ostracized away from the region. Its exile was perceived as a societal catharsis. It relates to the historical ritual of the ‘scapegoat’, which has come to mean any group or individual that innocently bears the blame for others in times of social conflict and crisis. The term derives from the Greek φάρμακον (pharmakon), which can act both as the remedy and the poison.

The PhD research (2018-2022) and accompanying exhibition, 'Pharmakos', at M HKA museum (9.12.22-8.1.23) investigate this societal phenomenon through the lenses of adornment. The starting point is the archival research conducted by the artist, mostly at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. She looked at WWII administration letters, where Nazi bureaucrats discussed the development of wearable signs used on human bodies in order to systematize their (id)entities in forced-labor camps. The display on these badges conditioned diverse bodies according to the value system and hierarchical logic of the regime and its allies. The color-coded signs determined the unwelcome in society. Or even distinguished the welcome.

While acknowledging similar locations of thought emerging globally today that attack self-determination, once again, Vivi Touloumidi investigates adornment as an active agent to address social discomfort, repression, and marginalization in the public realm. Her work appropriates signs of stigmatization employed during WWII and proposes wearable pieces that speak of resilience to support a practice of creative resistance. These statement-pieces are made for the emancipation of the female body and the social body. Adornment is seen as an instrument of empowerment, articulating processes of becoming and existing otherwise.

• Supervisors: Roel Arkesteijn (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp), Pascal Gielen (University of Antwerp)​

As a volatile medium, music seems to resist any form of rigidity. To a certain degree, a new work of art is being made in every performance of a musical work. Hence, the specificity of music in an aesthetic discourse is its potential to be analysed as a cultural practice or a form of (often implicit) interaction between the musical work and its performance context. Following this methodological potential, one may ask if a more events-based approach to music might enrich the current discourse, which seems to focus mostly on either the work of art itself or the social context in which it was created. In other words, the dialogue between the musicologist’s focus and the ample view of the cultural philosopher promises new perspectives in this socio-aesthetic debate.

To examine music and its performativity, this research will focus on canonisation processes. More precisely, the evolution of classical orchestras will provide a useful tool in the study of the genesis of the musical canon and its manifest inclination to rigidification today. Therefore, the canon is considered as a regulative concept, for a musical canon is not only created by artistic practice, it also performs a normative function by regulating that same practice. This research analyses orchestral transformations in the socio-aesthetic realm by bringing the organizational level back into view. Indeed, our main hypothesis will be that transformation of the canon or adherence to the canon determines (or at least, influences) the very structure, organizational form and sustainability of a symphony orchestra. The opposite relation should be addressed as well: how do pragmatic transformations in the structure and organization of a symphony orchestra (e.g. the use of freelancers, less rehearsal time, programming in function of audience-attraction, cultural outreach, …) affect the content of the canon itself and, accordingly, the development of an aesthetic paradigm?

This dual approach will enable us, throughout the course of this research, to take a step back and reflect upon the way developments in cultural practice (including the organizational structure of a symphony orchestra and its repertoire) are the outcome of a larger historical context to which developments in both the aesthetic realm as in the social realm can be brought back. By means of empirical case-studies in the cities of Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin and London, we ultimately hope to design a transnational perspective on this matter. Indeed, the analysis of musical practices could thus become a resource for understanding the history of urban societies.

Arne Herman, PhD Researcher

Promotor:
Prof. Dr. Pascal Gielen
University of AntwerpFaculty of Arts

Copromotor:
Dr. Marlies De Munck
University of Antwerp
Faculty of Arts

As the neoliberalization of our cities continues apace, a growing group of opponents assumes merit in the concept of ‘common space’. In common space, use and collectivity take precedence over profit and expert authorship. Whilst a growing body of scholarship construes such common spaces as pre-existing terrains to be reclaimed from capitalist command, less attention has gone to how they are raised from scratch. In order to fill this void, this study explores how common space is produced within the current conditions of urban development. In so doing, it follows the lead of a specific breed of architect: the one working at the crossroads of cultural activism and community organizing.

In-depth interviewing and participatory observation allow to lay bare the possibilities and pitfalls of commoning in a variety of cities. At the Public Land Grab (London), a derelict piece of urban land was transformed into a community farm. At Pension Almonde (Rotterdam), a social housing complex became a locus for cultural production. At Montaña Verde (Antwerp), a plaza was tweaked into a co-created piece of public art. Data from collectives such as the Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (Paris), Raumlabor (Berlin) and Zuloark (Madrid) are highlighted as well. Transversally, the voyage is guided by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space.

Results are threefold. First, the distinction between Symbiotic and Oppositional Commoning is proposed, resulting in a ‘Taxonomy of Tactics’. Second, the relation between urban commoners and municipal institutions is refined by advocating agonism. Finally, Lefebvre’s lexicon is mobilized in order to explore the cross-fertilization between urban commoning and political action. Overall, this dissertation puts the human imagination at the centre of the city. It will therefore be of value to scholars, artists and activists with an interest in the creative dimension of the built environment.

Supervisors: Pascal Gielen & Walter Weyns

External members: Stavros Stavrides, Caroline Newton & Liesbeth Huybrechts

Chair: Stijn Oosterlynck

The stimulation of the entrepreneurial self and activity, which non-coincidently concurs with the reduction of the social welfare state and public services (Bröckling, 2015:12), promotes a state of economic, social, mental and political instability through a labour subjectivity based on risk-taking (Sennet, 1998, p.75). This state of restlessness, also known as precarity, has been extensively invading social movements’ discourses, cultural labour studies, and social policy debates, and yet, there has been much less attention on how such a state of vulnerability has become a pivotal role in today’s hegemonic mode of governance (Butler, 2004; Lorey, 2015; Brökling, 2016; Sennett, 1998). Thereafter, popular responses to precarity have not guaranteed to move beyond a neoliberalist system that ultimately relies on dispossession from means of subsistence (Shukaitis, 2006; Federicci, 2004; Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 1999). The `precariat´ (Standing, 2011) presents thus fundamental differences between its predecessor the proletariat, making it unlikely that similar solutions for improving their social position are available. The political challenges that this current moment presents seek new methods of creative, revolutionary and social organization.

This PhD project takes on an exploration into practices that use the artistic field to reclaim control over our life by experimenting with new social formations based on processes of `commoning´ (Mies & Bennholdt-Thoomsen, 1999; Federicci, 2012; De Angelis, 2007). By doing so, it is followed a first hypothesis that art is becoming nowadays a propelling force of experimentation around practices of ‘commoning’, being those able to envision new forms of social organization. The commons, or what historian Peter Linebaugh has popularized as `practices of commomning´ (2008), are thought in this thesis as an antithesis to forms of exploitation and enclosure as it opens the base from which to start practicing social forms others to those defined by capital and the social relations built around it (De Angelis, 2007). Due to the failure of markets and the states to address the precarity in which society is currently embedded, the second main hypothesis of this research is moreover how, in order for these practices to create civil consciousness (Gielen & Dietachmair, 2017), it is necessary to create a network of support around them in which not just material and resources are shared but also experiences, legal loopholes and organizational methods are tested and exchanged. Localized issues are fought or solved thanks to a bigger national, international or transnational network of experience and resources that help its members to act and disobey faster, more operatively and commonly. The construction of a theoretical model around the idea of a `network of subsistence´, based on an autonomist feminist approach to precarity, will be hence one of the main focuses of this research. To do so, this PhD project will continually explore various case-studies in Germany (Berlin), Spain (Seville, Barcelona and Madrid) or Naples (Italy). The aim is to construct a solid study of complex interacting systems based around the idea of `network of subsistence´ to challenge precarious labor theory and their revolutionary forms, bringing a feminist perspective that centers the idea of the commons on issues of reproduction to precisely reconsider the entire world of production.

Lara Garcia Diaz - PhD researcher

Promotors:

Prof. dr. Pascal Gielen (University of Antwerp, Faculty of Arts)

Dr. Stijn Oosterlynck (University of Antwerp, Faculty of Social Sciences)

Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities is a project funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. University of Antwerp (through the CCQO) is participating together with Trans Europe Halles, Peer-to-Peer Foundation, European Cultural Foundation and seven urban labs: City of Lund, Sweden; Northern Tzoumerka, Greece; Region of Skåne, Sweden; Ambasada, Timisoara, Romania; CIKE, Kosice, Slowakia; Kaapeli, Helsinki, Finland; Hablarenarte, Madrid, Spain.

In this call, the European Commission has acknowledged the importance and potential of cultural and creative spaces for the creative and collaborative economy, job creation, social inclusion and urban development. Yet, the potential of many of these cultural spaces is still unleashed because a systemic approach to the interrelationship between economy, social inclusion, urban planning, innovation and Creative and Cultural Industries (CCI) is not encouraged under this system due to lingering new public management structures that tend to see everyone operating within their own compartments.

Though, the protection of art, culture and heritage is inseparable from the elaboration of more inclusive models of management and governance. In other words, the challenge is to let the artistic expression exist as a heterogeneous and humanly sustainable civic and cultural reality, which is intrinsically allergic to rigid rules and, at the same time, is constantly under threat because of the competitive and homogenizing logics of the market. Hence, for the CCQO, the aim of the research is to understand what is needed from the local authorities to be able to support or facilitate bottom-up initiatives, in particular availing itself of the theory and praxis of commons, which have proved to be able to create innovative models for social inclusion that will have an impact on local communities and their day-to-day city lives for generations to come. Sometimes, as in the case of L’Asilo in Naples, they have been able to even make a ‘creative use of law’, i.e. elaborating new rules – successively recognized and supported by the institution – with the aim of ‘hacking’ legality and bringing new participatory institutions in it.

In particular, the issue will be analysed from an interdisciplinary standpoint: a sociological one, with Pascal Gielen, a cultural policy one, with Hanka Otte, and a juridical one, with Maria Francesca De Tullio. Moreover, the research will be enriched by the interaction with P2P Foundation, especially concerning economic sustainability, and with European Cultural Foundation, with particular regard to the policy issues.

The objects, and, at the same time, the beneficiaries, of such research will be seven Urban Labs: urban processes of reciprocal approach between civil society and institutions. This means that the methodology will be a ‘convoking’ one: the researchers will be observing and, at the same time, facilitating the processes, contributing (and testing) their expertise in participatory procedures, though not being themselves activists within them, as in co-research approaches. So, the challenge for the research is to use theory as a means to be ‘creative’ about rules and policies, by still maintaining a pragmatic contact with flesh and blood participatory experiences.

Pascal Gielen coordinates the CCQO and he is interlocutor/supervisor of the multitude of singular projects of the research team.

At the moment his own researches/book projects are focused on Commonism (together with artist Nico Dockx- Royal Academy for the Arts, Antwerp), The Art of Civil Action (together with historian Philipp Dietachmair – European Cultural Foundation) and Residencies Reflected (together with art historian Irmeli Kokko – Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki; and art historian Taru Elfving – Frame Contemporary Art Finland). 

COMMONISM

A New Aesthetic of the Real

‘Commonism is not a narrow-minded one-party ideology. Just as the Rhineland and neoliberal model it could shape society though and in that respect it is political ideological in nature, or perhaps we could say it is ‘meta-ideological’, as it accommodates multiple party political ideas.’ – Gielen & Lijster, 2015

Every ideology is good at hiding the fact that it is one. That’s what makes it an ideology. To paraphrase Mark Fisher (2009): Every ideology claims realism. So it claims that it is not an ideology, not a belief-system, but reality: just the way things work and just the way things are. By consequence, it is just how (we need) to do things and how (we need) to deal with things. Communism was an ideology, fascism was also one, neoliberalism certainly is one, and probably most religions function like this. They are all aesthetics of the real. They claim to be the only real truth and by this claim those beliefs give form to society as real. Ideologies are very good in turning a belief into a reality, because they are make-believe and in this way they function as self-fulfilling prophecies. Ideologies are performances of reality.

And, we can confirm, there’s a new one in the making. It is called ‘commonism’. After half a century of neoliberalism, we are excited to welcome this new ideology. For the record, it’s not about communism with a ‘u’, but commonism with an ‘o’. It is still in the margins, very often still under the radar, but we cannot ignore the fact that it’s popping up everywhere: the commons. After the ‘enclosure of the commons’ by privatization, by neoliberal politics or simply by capital, it seems that the era of the ‘disclosure of the commons’ is now dawning. At least, that’s what some people, mostly from the political left, believe in. What is this belief about? They believe that social relationships can replace money (contract) relationships. They certainly believe that we need more solidarity. And they trust in peer-to-peer relationships to develop new ways of production. Some of them think that economy sucks while others believe that only this economy sucks. Most of them agree that the contemporary political model of democracy does not stand for real democracy anymore, because representative democracies are becoming more and more the servants of a financial elite. So, we need another, more radical political system and some people even dream of a direct democracy.

The research wants to map those new ideological thoughts. How do they work and, especially, what is their aesthetics? Just as communism, fascism or neoliberalism, commonism is an aesthetic of the real. It’s a belief, a make-believe that claims realism.

At least it claims to stand closer to our contemporary ecological and social reality than capitalism. But it is also nearer to how social relationships really function, and much closer to what humanity in general is about. The former technocratic soviet communists, the German Nazis, the Italian fascists and the contemporary western neoliberals all share one characteristic: They neglect(ed) the human condition in their political and economic organization of society. Commoners, on the contrary, put this human figure back in the centre. That’s why they think about the ecological, social, political, economic, and even the mental conditions of mankind. Commonism is concerned about the total person in his or her total context and global environment. And it’s this total concern that makes commonism more and more convincing. At least, this new belief gives the impression that it stands nearer to reality today than neoliberalism does. And we—the editors of this book—confess: we too believe in a more common future. We too are sick off neoliberalism and its perverse mechanisms, and we also believe that the proposals of the ‘commoners’ fit better with the contemporary global reality, and with the human condition in general. But, probably unlike a lot of ‘commoners’, we also strongly believe that this belief is an ideology. That’s why we speak about ‘common-ism’, by the way. We do this because we see that commonism too is an aesthetic of real: it argues and operates in the name of realism. In that sense it does not really differ from Friedrich Hayek who started his neoliberal project in the 1940s in name of reality. Just as commonism now, neoliberalism was at that time a very marginal project (Srnicek and Williams, 2015), and just as with neoliberalism we do not yet know if commonism will grow and take up a dominant position, as neoliberalism did in the 1970s. We even do not yet know if we really want this, but just as with neoliberalism that’s out of our hands. For us the main difference probably lies here: just as most historical ideologists, Hayek did not see himself as an ideologist, but as a… realist. Well, the difference is that we do! We say we believe in commonism and also that we know it’s an ideology. So, as a consequence, we are ideologists. And all commoners are, but maybe not all of them agree. Probably their distancing themselves from the notion has to do with the quite negative image the concept of ideology has, as a thing that hides things, that works as an ‘opium of the people’, which masks reality in name of reality. But maybe it’s better to invert this way of reasoning. At least we try to do this here by saying: we are ideologists, we are conscious of our make-believe and we are very aware of the fact that we construct a reality. But we do this, because we are convinced it is a better reality and we also believe it fits better with the contemporary human condition. We could call it a self-conscious ideology, one that tries to convince others because it’s convinced of the truth of another reality than the contemporary one. And we use the same strategies as all the other ideologists by saying that this current reality is not true, it is fake, it is cynical and opportunistic, but certainly not real. And just like other ideologists we do so in the name of realism. For us, this is a way to open up the horizon for this book. Through contributions by artists, theorists and researchers we want to evoke a better understanding of the commons as an ideology. That means as an aesthetic of the real: a way of giving form to society and our contemporary human condition. With Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten we understand aesthetics as ‘the art of thinking beautifully’ about what could be beyond the horizon (Raunig, 2015). For us it’s a way of thinking of a better, more beautiful world that manifests itself in the liminal zone between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and reality, utopianism and realism. In the aesthetic of the real, fiction can become reality and reality is constructed in the shadows of human imaginations. In this research and book we want to put a spotlight on those reciprocating movements for the commons. How is the commons constituted in society? How does it shape our reality of living together? What strategies and what aesthetics do artistic commoners follow?

Fisher, M. (2009), Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? Winchester UK: Zero Books.

Gielen, P. & Lijster, T. (2015), ‘Culture: The Substructure of a European Common’, In: Gielen, P. (ed.) No Culture, No Europe. On the foundation of Politics. Amsterdam: Valiz, 19-65.

Raunig, G. (2015), ‘The Invention of Aesthetic Law. An Experiment on the Aesthetic Horizon and the Art of Living Beautifully’, in: Gielen, P. & Van Tomme, N. (eds.) Aesthetic Justice. Intersecting Artistic and Moral Perspectives. Amsterdam: Valiz, 95-111.

Srnicek, N. & Williams, A. (2015), Inventing the Future. Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London & New York: Verso.

THE ART OF CIVIL ACTION

Cultural Explorations of a Transnation Civil Society

This research/book project aims to discuss the potential of arts and culture for the establishment of a transnational civil space. Different voices from various theoretical fields in the social and cultural sciences but also activists and artists will explore if and how arts and culture can offer the building bricks for a locally rooted civil society in a globally connected context. All texts in this publication are based on two general assumptions:

The contribution of arts and culture to the formation of democratic processes and their strongly determining role for the constitution of a civil domain often remains underappreciated. This publication argues that cultural initiatives nonetheless play a key role in unlocking dormant democratic potential in our societies. Arts and culture build a cornerstone of the civil domain, especially as civil society around the world increasingly deals with global questions and starts to assume transnational forms of organisation.While the civil domain has traditionally been considered as an area of mainly national relevance the last two decades have seen a growing number of cross-border initiatives of supranational significance and sometimes even global outreach (e.g. Occupy, the Indignados, etc.). Witnessing these developments however also came along with the realisation that most of these initiatives vanish almost as quickly as they have gained wider public attention. We therefore ask ourselves how such preliminary developments towards a more transnational civil domain could be made more sustainable. Which strategies and forms of organisation can such new initiatives assume in order to sustain their activities and increase their local influence and global significance?The research/publication will analyse a number of cultural organisations and new forms of citizen initiatives from all over Europe. Supported by interviews and texts by or about cultural activists and artistic projects that have worked across Europe but also beyond we try to get a clearer image of some of the new tactics and strategies they have developed. All texts and contributions specifically focus on the role of arts and culture in these new citizen-led initiatives and how these new approaches put the ‘art’ of civil action into practice.

Although the majority of cases to be discussed in our publication come from the (wider) pan-European context we also highlight views of analysts from other political contexts and inquire practices on other continents. These non-European voices do not only support our search for the potential of establishing a transnational (global) civil space. Citizen initiatives that operate in an entirely different cultural, socio-economic or political context can also serve as insightful examples for the development of new European practices.

A variety of ongoing socio-economic transformation processes in societies and communities inside the European Union provide the analytical backdrop for all reflections in this book: a central point of departure is the transition from the traditional welfare state or Rhineland model to a neo-liberal model that goes along with the withdrawal of state support structures. It might be exactly for this reason that Europe currently witnesses the emergence of more and more new, autonomously operating citizen initiatives. Nevertheless, it is therefore also very important to analyse initiatives that historically do not share the same political, economic or cultural context – especially when it comes to investigating the variety of roles arts and culture might have played for these new civil initiatives.

In this framework The Art of Civil Action presents a colourful mix of cases and conceptual views on citizen-led cultural initiatives from Europe and around the world. Our hope as editors is that the diversity of analytical approaches as well as the examples of new organising structures and artistic voices we compiled for this book may contribute at least a small (cultural) brick for building the transnational civil domain of the future.

RESIDENCIES REFLECTED

Alternative Economies of Exchange in the Arts

The research/book examines the present and potential function of residencies for artists, the art world and the society at large.

The globalization process and the increasing growth of the art market have all had an impact on the latest developments of artists’ residencies. The core function of residencies continues to be in support of artistic development, to provide time and space for making art, research and critical reflection. However, residencies have today become also attached to biennials, museums, scientific research centres, universities, even airports and businesses of various kinds. While residences are becoming integrated into the intensified and expanding processes of production in the arts, new artist residency organisations are founded, often by artists, more as a breakaway or escape from these structures. Often established in remote areas, the ethos behind these residencies includes a search for more sustainable alternatives than the neoliberal condition allows for artistic practice.

This present breakaway of artist-run residencies suggests a continuation of Western artistic movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries, where the rural and the urban have in turns played the backdrop in the changing conditions. This has also resonated with shifts in the role of artists, such as in the movement from the rural ‘artist colonies’ of the 19th century to the bohemian experimentalism in the cities of the 20th Century (Nina Lübbren). The latter cosmopolitan artist communities represented intellectual homes across nation state and language boundaries in a Europe of anti-Semitism, nationalism, patriarchy, and restricted mobility. The modern realm of art with its own landscape and language was created by the emigrant or exile (Caren Kaplan). Now, the ‘altermodern’ nomad artist described by Nicolas Bourriaud is characterized by diversity of possibilities, several alternative routes and roots in art and aesthetics, times, places and cultures – with an attitude of resistance against the standardizing forces of globalization.

Reflected against this background the research/book at hand asks: What is the present ethical and social role of artist residencies in contemporary society? What is the relationship between the classical art world system and the residencies of today? What is the role of residencies for artists in the present? What kind of artistic endeavors do residencies support? How do they meet the changing needs of individual artists? How can residencies provide retreats not only from patterns of thought but also pressures of production or even political prosecution? How can residencies provide alternative openings and infrastructures to nurture artistic work in the midst of current societal transformations and environmental crisis? How can residencies impact change within the art institutions that adopt them as tools? Can residencies develop a new economy for the arts that could work outside the market (maybe also outside the state system) and function as a means to create sustainable global solidarities and relationships?

The Future of the New
Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration
Arts in Society / IKK

Novelty is thus systematically valorized at the expense of durability, and this organization of detachment, that is, of unfaithfulness or infidelity (equally called flexibility), contributes to the decomposition of libidinal economy, to the spread of drive-based behaviors and to the liquidation of social systems.

Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy

Innovation has become an inherently problematic notion for contemporary art and art theory. Since the nineteenth century, ‘the new’ has been the primary value in artistic practice and discourse. Moreover, due to this preoccupation with innovation, modern art was often considered a source of social critique and an ally of social movements resisting the domination of tradition. Likewise, twentieth-century artists and intellectuals who criticized consumer culture often invoked the ‘new’. Capitalism was said to ‘infect everything with sameness’ (Horkheimer and Adorno), as the standardization of commodity production left little room for the spontaneity, creativity and individual autonomy expressed in art.

However, what happens if novelty and innovation themselves become the problem? Today, the dominant strand of critique considers modernity’s ‘social acceleration’ (Rosa) and ‘short-termism’ (Stiegler) as main sources of alienation and discontent. Hartmut Rosa points to the paradox that despite all our timesaving technologies people hardly have the feeling that they have plenty of time. On the contrary, more and more people feel lost in a world that innovates perpetually and beyond their control. Moreover, there is an increasing a-synchronicity between different social domains: the relatively slow-working world of politics can hardly keep pace with the world of finance.Innovation can no longer be considered a self-evidently progressive value, now that it is part and parcel of post-industrial consumer culture. Social movements and theorists increasingly advocate slowing the pace of capitalism, emphasizing the need for continuity and security in people’s lives. They are accompanied by humanitarian and environmental organizations, which underline the need for sustainable solutions to the problems caused by ‘innovation’.

This creates a problem for contemporary art and art theory. Can artistic innovation still function as a source of critique? People continue to turn to the arts for critical relief from the onrush of empty commodity novelty, once described by Walter Benjamin as ‘the eternal recurrence of the new’, but how can the arts provide such relief when they are continually forced to be innovative? Artists themselves are struggling with a legitimation crisis and find it difficult to respond to the ever-increasing influence of the creative and culture industries. How can the arts critically relate to contemporary culture of change when they are themselves and by their own definition forced into innovation?

In The Future of the New we want to reflect on the role of the arts in times of social acceleration. We want to investigate concepts and strategies that allow to deal with the problems mentioned above. How do artists deal with the changing role of and discourse on innovation? Do they renounce innovation and turn to traditional practices (the revival of craftsmanship), do they look for alternative ways to innovate, or do they, in a gesture of over-identification, immerse themselves in social acceleration so as to speed-up even more and let capitalism crash against its own limits (as proposed by accelerationism)?

For The Future of the New we invite theorists, critics, artists and professionals in the art field to reflect on the concept and practice of artistic innovation, and its role in various conceptions of the relationship between art and social critique. The central questions are: What can artistic innovation mean today, and can it still function as a source of social critique? Can and should we distinguish between different concepts of innovation (e.g. on the basis of their relationship to history and tradition)? Are innovation and novelty necessarily connected to acceleration, or can we think of ways to detach them (as Benjamin Noys proposes)? Can we think of way to reconnect contemporary art to social critique without it having to forsake the imperative to innovate? Can we still use terms as ‘avant-garde’, ‘novelty’ and ‘progressive’ in the art world, now that they have become tainted by consumer capitalism? How revolutionary are the artistic revolutionaries, now that the modus operandi of capitalism is itself the ‘permanent revolution’ once dreamt of by Trotski?

The Future of the New brings together debates in three different disciplines: 1) within sociology of the arts, concerning the origins of artistic innovation, 2) within aesthetics and philosophy of time, concerning the ontology of innovation, and 3) within critical social theory, concerning the social and cultural problems created by acceleration and perpetual innovation. The book addresses a theme that is highly relevant to professionals and policy makers in the arts, namely the question whether and how the arts can be a source of social critique, and how it can relate to the problems created by increasing social acceleration. The book is aimed at critics, artists, researchers, students, and all those who are interested in the current state of artistic innovation or concerned about its future. Combining timely analyses of contemporary art and inspiring visions for the future, The Future of the New attempts to set the agenda for the debate on the function and value of artistic innovation.

This PhD project takes on an exploration into the relationship between the specific context of the creative industries and corresponding organizational responses as it investigates how the environment surrounding a creative organization can create opposing demands on the organization – leading to issues in sustainability and innovative capacity. The specific environment that creative organizations face will be viewed in terms of the ‘creative biotope’ as introduced by Gielen (2010). It is composed of four domains or spheres that influence a sustainable artistic practice, with each domain containing its own ‘logic’ to achieve legitimacy: the domestic, peers, market and civil spheres. Correspondingly, each domain exudes its own influences and pressures on the creative organization on how to behave. This PhD project postulates that the business model, defined as the active operationalization of an organization’s strategy, can be used as a balancing mechanism to mitigate these tensions. Harnessing multiple tensions within a single business models is challenging because each of the opposing domains requires a different and often incompatible activity set. This, according to Markides (2013), can be framed as the ambidexterity challenge of business models, which will be a key focus in this research.

In September 2020, Walter successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled: “Balancing the creative business model”

Walter van Andel

Promotors:

Prof. Dr. Annick Schramme, Faculty of Applied Economics

Prof. Dr. Koen Vandenbempt, Faculty of Applied Economics