Art Factories, Community-led Cultural Centers, and Third Spaces in Repurposed Buildings

The Fabriques de Creacio in Barcelona, the network of Tiers-lieux in France, and the grass-roots Centres Civics elsewhere in Spain and Latin America, have different origins yet they share an ethos: locally-rooted, locally-driven initiatives established by citizens and artists under a municipal umbrella in abandoned, post-industrial buildings and urban districts. All serve as stages for communal life and supporting infrastructure for artistic production, popular arts, and folk culture.

Their complexity and success confounds the binaries of market and state, of public and private, that structure Anglo neo-liberal 'culture wars'. Yet a visit to any of these places immediately attests to their vitality: from the phenomenal civic, social, and architectural success of Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompéia in Sao Paulo (1977-1988), part of the non-governmental social services initiative SESC (El Servicio Social do Comércio), to Friche la Belle de Mai in the poorest district in Marseille (1992-ongoing), and many of the other cultural centers in the Trans Europe Halles (1983-ongoing) network.

This session calls for papers that attempt to make sense of such projects in their particular milieux while connecting them to larger questions of contemporary artistic and cultural consumption and production. It invites close studies of projects and initiatives that treat the city and its cultural/artistic life as living questions rather than as commodities for consumption by tourists and global media. It is especially interested in projects and initiatives outside Europe -- in the Americas, in Africa, and Asia -- to enrich our sense of what is possible.