Abstract
Precarious Spaces: The Arts, Social and Organization Change examines several forms of artistic and activist intervention into peripheral urban environments in the Global South, including Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Cape Town. The collected essays that comprise the volume point out and begin to fill a gap in social science and art historical literature by complicating and refusing simple conclusions about the political efficacy of art, while also expanding a transdisciplinary niche with an aim to theorize the potential of arts-based methodologies, aesthetics, and political practice. The creative projects and organizing practices of those living in precarity – especially related to housing, labor, and representation – are made central in each essay and inform the editors’ theoretical and political priorities. The result is the disruption and dislocation of knowledge production and epistemological assumptions away from the Global North.
Whether the editors intend it or not, the term ‘precarious spaces’ suggests a well-placed discursive jab (this volume, perhaps a scholarly invitation to spar) at the now ubiquitous use of ‘creative cities,’ an anesthetized catchall to describe the future of urban design and planning. Richard Florida’s (2002) well-rehearsed argument that puts the so-called ‘creative class’ at the center of successful planning policy and design stands – unnamed – in the shadows of this collection of essays. Rather than mount a book-length critique of current trends in planning, editors Katarzyna Kosmala (professor of culture, media and visual arts at the University of the West of Scotland) and Miguel Imas (senior lecturer of organizational and social psychology at Kingston University) have compiled a selection of essays that serve as counterpoints to the creative cities trope without dismissing the importance and power of creativity and imagination to envision and materialize more livable and just cities and communities. Thus, they highlight modes of organizing, artistic production, and research that produce social change by and for people living in urban peripheries.
The book is divided into three parts: ‘Introducing the Volume,’ ‘Emancipating: The Arts and the Possibility of Change,’ and ‘Resisting: Opening Organizations, Altering Organizing.’ Part I includes the editors’ explanation of the importance of examining – or examining differently – precarious spaces. To achieve this end, Kosmala and Imas situate the essays and, by extension, the examined projects, in the literature of several areas, including sociology, urban studies, theories of art practice, postcolonial theory, and political economy. The essays of Parts II and III feature art and arts-based projects (‘Emancipating’), followed by examinations of critical organizing (‘Resisting’). Emancipation here has several meanings: of and/or from space (Chapters 3 and 7), history (Chapters 5 and 6), or potential future value (Chapter 4). All the chapters in Part II are grounded in artists’ projects or arts-based community building or research. It is notable that Part III’s exploration of resistance deals exclusively with organizing and not with art or arts-based practices; culture, however, is primary in these essays as requisite for or a product of action (Chapters 8 and 9), activism’s medium (Chapter 10), or as something to be represented and remembered (Chapters 11 and 12). The work of Judith Butler, Claire Bishop, Michel de Certeau, Grant Kester, Milton Santos, and Henri Lefebvre feature prominently throughout the essays.
Framed by the theoretical introductory chapter by Kosmala and Imas, these essays remind us that those living amidst relations of precarity are not waiting for or in need of ‘fixing’ by beneficent outsiders, as if precarious existence indicated helplessness, or was accidental or outside relations of capital and governance. Individuals and populations living in precarity, such as indigenous communities (Chapter 8), former factory workers (Chapter 9), or the ‘failed artist’ (p. 7; from Sholette’s Dark Matter, 2011), make existing systems of exploitation, colonialism, and market expansion possible. From this assumption, Kosmala and Imas are asking a two-part question: what is to be done, and what does art do? In particular, how does (or can) art respond to precarity in everyday life in urban spaces marked by informality and marginality? What purpose can art serve for organizing? The answer the editors and the volume’s contributors offer is that precarity and its vicissitudes, such as flexible and contingent work, offer new ‘thresholds’ (p. 5) for theorizing social change, as well as providing new models of possibility for socially-engaged and activist art. Kosmala and Imas remind us, however, that the distribution of precarity, as with all social relations, is uneven. The terms of an encounter are uneven; therefore, it is imperative that outside artists, activists, or scholars be attentive to their potential impact when engaging precarity and those living in its conditions. There is a blurred line – yet one that must be navigated – between forwarding or taking up counter-epistemologies and movement-building strategies on the one hand, and fetishizing and thus reproducing or justifying lives lived in poverty and precarity on the other. Overall, the essays here avoid the latter, but each author deals with the ethical implications of the projects and their own work with varying degrees of depth and criticality.
Both a strength and weakness of a book that poses difficult ethical, political, methodological, and aesthetic questions, to name a few of the topics covered, is the near impossibility of reaching a conclusion or avoiding contradiction. Several of the essays, including the editors’ introduction, address the dark side of edging toward the collapse of art, politics, and activism. Most work to avoid falling into pessimism and futility on the one hand, and projecting hope or romanticizing struggle on the other, by reminding the reader of the specificity of each project and place. The question of what is to be done is answered, with varying degrees of optimism and success, by these essays; but the question of what art is, or what it does as art – the more difficult question, no doubt – feels largely unanswered. To repeat: I see this as both strength and weakness as readers are left to grapple with those same questions, but now with more fuel for the fire. Indeed, Kosmala and Imas have succeeded in compiling an index of a number of the threads of conversations around urban space, relational, and socially engaged aesthetics, activism, and political action, and socioeconomic relations of power of the past 20 years. It is significant that they draw theoretical contour lines across disciplines and locations, bringing to mind Cindi Katz’s (2001) notion of counter-topography as a way to make connections using relations and flows of capital, people, and culture.
The collection is a useful introduction to the politics of artistic and activist practices in South America (especially Brazil); but though the editors and most of the contributing authors offer brief histories and reviews of the theoretical literature, some familiarity with the debates around participatory, relational, and socially engaged art, and at least a cursory knowledge of the political histories of the countries and cities discussed, will be helpful. On the other hand, one will likely be inclined to pursue further research into the places, organizations, scholars, and artists after reading – an outcome I am sure the editors would consider a successful one.