joi, 7 februarie 2008

SYNTHESIS

*** Introduction
The first meetings of Banlieues d’Europ’est – Centres on the Outskirts - presented many experiences having taken place on the geographical or artistic outskirts of cities, while emphasizing a series of issues that are to be researched in depth: funding, perennity of actions, partnerships.
The importance of these issues within the social and economic context of our times prompts us to carry out the reasoning process in more concrete terms, and to propose binomial terms such as: the artist and the city (artists` role in the life of the town, but also the role played by the elected officials and by the local authorities in the implementation of artistic projects), the artist and the population (the manner in which the artist settles in an area, the way in which he gets involved, and how he reacts to the change).

The goal of this project was to re-question the place of artistic and cultural projects in the life of a city and its communities/marginalized areas and to build a political partnership – artist - city/elected officials - upon an artistic practice.
Banlieues d’Europe supports the idea that the culture should play an important part in the life of deprived populations, in the marginalised neighbourhoods and districts, or in any geographically, socially, and consequently, artistically excluded area. We speak therefore of the necessity to involve the artistic networks in the implementation of such projects in the areas on the outskirts of the town, with the participation of various population categories. It seems important nowadays to cross the mental or geographical borders owing to the work on the imaginary the artistic projects propose.

Project key words: districts, town, populations, arts, culture, interventions, Europe, exchanges, training, and network.

About twenty participants coming from Romania, Bulgaria, France presented their experiences and debated on various topics: the town and the innovative and participative artistic/cultural practices, the artist and the urban communities, the artist’s “commitment” – interventions in the social and urban space.
The idea behind this first meeting was to give the floor to the actors developing artistic projects within specific contexts (neighbourhoods, communities, public space, prisons, alternative places…) in order to highlight the difficulties they come across but also what is at stake in this kind of projects. Our concern was to make the experiences traced visible, to confront them, to share them, in order to be able to create a space where this enthusiasm may be shared, equalled, or surpassed, where this will of action may take shape into joint projects.

Participants:
Manuèle Debrinay-Rizos (cultural attachée, General Delegate of the Alliance française of Paris to Bulgaria), Sarah Levin (director of Banlieues d’Europe, France), Silvia Cazacu (Banlieues d’Europ’est, Romania), Irina Cios (director of ICCA – International Center for Contemporary Art - , Romania), Frédérique Ehrmann (artist, France), Petko Dourmana (director of InterSpace, Bulgaria),
Philippe Mouillon (plastic artist, Artistic Director of the Grenoble Laboratory and of Local.contemporain, France), Christian Benedetti (theatre director and director of Théâtre Studio d’Alfortville, France), Krassimira Krastanova (University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria), Maria Draghici, Irina Gadiuta (artists of the group “attack of generosity”, Romania), Doru Catanescu (actor, GAT005- Group for Theatrical Action, Romania), Pascal Brunet (director of Relais Culture Europe – Resource centre for Europe and Culture, France), Pascale Bonniel Chalier (consultant in international cultural projects, France), Dessislava Gavrilova (director, Red House - Centre for Culture and Debate, Sofia, Bulgaria), Emile Varbanov (chief expert of the National Cultural Fund, Bulgaria), Claudine Justrafré (cooperation attachée, French Institute of Sofia).

***European Context
a) Some General Remarks
- In the physical meaning of the term, the European borders are about to be retraced
- Within Europe, the cultural diversity is rather recreating inter-European tensions
- People’s claims over their languages (an issue that exists among culture, institution, democracy, economy) and the question regarding the circulation of works, the use of works to the purpose of strengthening the presence of the language
- The territorial aspects regarding the cohesion policy, the importance of the territories and, especially, the importance of the urban territories, their recent mutations
- The issues regarding the populations, the communities, engendered by immigration, the difficulty of starting a debate on this topic
- The development of economical or cultural globalization phenomena
- The impact of the economy on the cultural sector and vice-versa
- The difficulty of the small cultural actors to manage important amounts in the cultural field
b) Their consequences on the European agenda
Nowadays, we witness the multiplication, on a communitarian level, of numerous debates on:
- The globalization (the European Commission has started thinking rather about an axis for action with regard to the globalization phenomenon than about a policy)
- The multilingualism (a debate that is going to appear in six months)
- The preservation of the cultural diversity
- The importance of the urban fact in the cohesion policy
Another level is the place the culture occupies in the external relations of the European Union. Important aspects:
- The emergence of the EU will to start a new political dialogue with other regional units
- The acknowledgement of the cultural point in the political concerns (a forum in Moscow will lay the foundations for the meditation on the cultural cooperation between Russia and Europe)
The third remark consists in the fact that the culture will never be subject to a particular policy, for EU has no cultural policy. Instead, there is a will to integrate the culture in the mainstreaming of the existent European policies.
The first workshops that are part of the discussions taking place, according to the schedule, after 2014, will open with the cultural issue. This is a new vision, and this new change translates into the agendas of Lisbon and Göteborg.
The first agenda is that having caused the emergence of the idea of the knowledge society. The cultural actors must address the issue of our role in the production of knowledge and in the sharing of knowledge. The second ingredient of the Lisbon strategy is represented by the issue of the innovation. What gives rise to the innovation inside a society or territory? The third ingredient: the innovation must concern the economical and social innovation. The cultural actors are capable of interfering with both these sectors.
The Göteborg agenda tackles the issue of the sustainable development, together with the inherent difficulty of well distinguishing the place of the culture as part of this development. The second ingredient, and we must know how to integrate it, is represented by the social innovation; any development can only be managed and ensured in the context of the development of a more and more fair society. The Göteborg text says that, without social equity, this development cannot fulfil the condition of durability. And the third device concerns the issue of our taking into account the environmental matter via the cultural sector.
These two important agenda postulate the fact that the territory is the place where three problematics are joined together: the economical development, the cultural development, and the environmental laboratory.
c) Perspectives for the Culture
- Fundamental question: What are the innovation areas of the cultural sector?
Areas to which little thought has been given:
- The approach of projecting on the cultural sector things that have been achieved in the economic sector: la the issue of incubators, of nurseries, an entire array of mechanisms that the economic world or the world of development have imagined in order to meet the needs of emergence or of support of fragile activities that must be strengthened at a certain point
- Starting thinking about the local productive systems that are the systems of an urbanized world. How to re-build this production system in larger territories or in territories capable of cooperating and to envisage the complementarities in a new way. This is an important mutation: the idea of imagining oneself as an actor – engineer of the entire array of problematics and to project them in strategic devices with a perspective.
And the other innovation plan proposed by the European programmes regards the entire sector of the social innovation, with the issue of the micro-funding; how would the micro-funding respond to the development of the small actors. We must think about widely explored mechanisms in the past such as the micro-credit, the guarantee system, and the mechanisms that support the emergence of economically fragile actors and that, at the same time, guarantee the autonomy of these actors.
The second way is represented by the local exchange systems, the L.S.E.s. These are also sectors that may be noticed in the social economy. How do we imagine, apart from a commercial activity, something that is beyond a non-commercial economy? How do we re-think the exchange system?
The third way of social innovation that is important for the cultural sector is the issue of mutualisation. How do we make again mutual part of the knowledge, functions, mechanisms, and how do we install them on cooperation structures?
The obvious conclusion here is to re-think all the European devices as laboratories for the cultural sector.
a) Urban Territory
The urban space has two important features:
- “It is everything but a white page” (Philippe Mouillon), it is a space where an extraordinary amount of layers of history are superposed
- This is a moving space
Therefore, the intervention in the urban space requires:
- a specific work: “we interfere with something that is not the equivalent of an workshop or a museum… we interfere with something that is neither white nor empty” (Phillippe Mouillon)- the prospective work: we are living in societies that alter very quickly and therefore it is important to meditate on and anticipate the potential mutations
- a theoretical work parallel to the artistic work
Mutations and problematics of the contemporary town:
- More complex identity systems where the global is extremely present in the construction of the individuals` identity
- Time mutation: the domination of the present time, of the instant, of the instantaneity, and a memory crisis, very few projections in the future, very few returns to the past
- The existence of a space fracture between the districts of a town, which gives rise to strong tensions and to real social problems. Objectives: to attempt to re-build the balance between various urban territories and to interfere against a certain form of territorial discrimination in order to be able to help certain districts to regain their strength (e.g. the town policy, implemented about twenty years ago in France)

b) Artistic Project
How can we work on these urban contemporary mutations? How can we react, meditate on, make these mutations visible? Examples: the Laboratory, the Local.contemporain, Grenoble, France and InterSpace, Sofia, Bulgaria.
Open Questions and Difficulties:
- Difficult urban contexts (e.g. Sofia, Bucharest) with respect to the implementation of artistic projects: the advertising industry that submerges the town, the public authorisation, the town of liberal type (town of fragmentation, of dis-rupture, town of the capitalist profit system based on the investment, without benefiting from an Urbanism Plan), etc.
- The difficulty of having a dialogue with the town populations, to involve them in artistic projects
- The concepts – urban space and public space – their different understanding depending on the social, historical context, etc.
- What is the engine powering the innovation? What is it that makes a territory innovating?
- The impossibility of weighing the interest in a certain artistic work carried on in the urban environment

c) Inhabitants, Participation
We are nowadays the witnesses of a fairy frequent phenomenon occurring all over Europe: the distancing of a certain number of inhabitants, of citizens, from the responsibility centers of power. The public policies and, above all, the local policies are nowadays expert policies. The inhabitants are completely set apart from the important decision making processes with regard to the town planning policy of creating a town and to the policy concerning the artistic, cultural, and patrimonial action, for instance. Objectives: to find the means, the moments when the inhabitants may take again possession of their towns, state their complex identities, identities that are often denied, and thet they need to express.
A second remark concerns the existence of the town – world, with a multicultural local society that is not perceived in the same manner by all its inhabitants. A certain number of social classes feel threatened by the presence of the foreigner, which gives rise to tensions, to conflicts.

Participation is a term that actually covers various levels of commitment, and may take completely different shapes. In this context, the essential question is how to build the mobilisation? Example: the town of Lyon, with its successes and failures.
The result is the reappearance of a complex process: supporting the populations in forging their own representations: a work that requires the means to do it, but also the responsibility of the artists and of the structures involved.

d) Connection among an Artistic Project, a Territory, and Its Inhabitants
Many artistic approaches to the territory: working on, for, or with the territory
Many types of spaces: public space, private space, urban and public space, private and urban space.
Fundamental questions:
- How do the artistic interventions modify the social and urban space (or the vision on the social and urban space) of life and of its inhabitants? And, the other way round, how does the confrontation with a territory modify the artistic practices?
- What is the project engineering that we can implement in order for it to answer the collective concerns, almost a public command, and at the same time, to create the conditions that are favourable to this achievement for the artists involved?
- How can we work on the territory resource?
- How can we activate the artistic creation in a context less or not institutionalised and closer to the real life?
- How can we create open pilotage committees with transversal dynamics in order to cross many approaches (territorial, social, artistic, and social insertion)?
- What about the necessity of working on the time, of having an eco-cultural approach, of reporting oneself at the same time to space and to time, while being respectful to the processes that we attempt to create?
- How can we “measure” the impact of the artistic projects on the local development of the communities?
Some General Remarks:
Phenomena that make difficult the attempt to develop innovative and participative artistic practices in countries such as Romania and Bulgaria:
- The bureaucracy
- The rather slow financing mechanisms
- The lack of infrastructures in the cultural area of the districts
- The lack of training programmes for the artists or cultural operators who wish to initiate projects in this area
- The lack of political will and of strategies in this respect
The public system and the funding mechanisms are really that honest, and this is due to the transition era these countries find themselves in.
Recommendations:
- Taking the time to prepare projects that are not only event, short-term, theme-oriented projects
- Fight against the European rhythm that supposes an accumulation of political will, slightly chaotic, that goes in all directions. In this respect, the Bulgarians, as well as the Romanians, have difficulties in seeing to what extent they can interfere with the current devices that are that numerous
- Think about the entire array of European devices as laboratories in the cultural field

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