Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk

Project author: Cohabitation Strategies
Project location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Year/s of execution: 2013
Commissioned by: Freehouse at Het Wijkwaardenhuis (The Netherlands)
Project’s collaborators: Hans Venhuizen, Karin Mientjes, Peter Zuiderwijk

The Power of Two is a talent show whose aim is to produce services for the quarter of Afrikaanderwijk through a collaborative process. Afrikaanderwijk is situated in the South bank of Rotterdam and it is considered one of the most problematic areas of the city. Just to give an example: 28% of its inhabitants have an income which is under the poverty line.
The Power of Two was created during a month-long residency program offered to Cohabitation Strategies by the Freehouse. The Freehouse is an artistic project of Jeanne van Heeswijk, which has been operating in the Afrikaanderwijk area since 2008 in order to make visible the existing qualities of this neighborhood. The Freehouse recently generated a new hub, Het Wijkwaardenhuis, which is a platform for new encounters and collaborations in the neighborhood and for giving visibility to local products and assets. The Power of Two emerged from a dialogue Cohabitation Strategies had with Het Wijkwaardenhuis in order to contribute to this goal.
One of the issues which generated the idea of The Power of Two is the current obsession of the Dutch government to strengthen talents in The Netherlands and especially in problematic areas. Despite the considerable amount of money the government is investing for talent programs, those problematic areas aren’t really empowered but rather paternalistically re-educated.
We wanted to reverse the concept of talent and success spread by government programs and by the media in general, by using the very common format of the talent show. A format that everybody in the neighborhood know and easily can engage with. Instead of focusing on the individual talent and on the ultimate chance in life to gain success - as proposed in the televised talent shows -, we wanted to activate a collaborative process of creation of services. Those services have to originate from the inventive collaboration of two or more contestants of the talent show, they have to be the result of the union of the participants’ diverse qualities, they have to be useful for the neighborhood of Afrikaanderwijk.
The Power of Two puts into question how a talent is usually seen and perceived. It is based on the fact that each of us has an inclination, a capacity or a skill which can be useful for the society and can be turned into a talent by means of a creative process of collaboration. Moreover it encourages participants to invent innovative services which can respond to the contemporary needs.


Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk

The first edition of The Power of Two was a pilot project which involved ten participants in a three-weeks long talent show.
The first week the contestants got to know each other through a blind date and formed small groups of two or three people. Their task was to work together for the coming two weeks in order to create anoriginal service for the neighborhood.
The second week the small groups met with mentors whose aim was to advise and challenge them in order to prepare a feasible plan for the further development of the service.
The final of The Power of Two took place during the third week. On this occasion the small groups presented and performed their ideas for a service. A jury was appointed to comment on the proposals an to establish, together with the audience, the best ideas. The first group winner was awarded with 500 euros, the second group winner was awarded with an in-kind support from the Freehouse.
During the three weeks of the talent show, participants immediately engaged with and understood the very essence of the game. They managed to manifest their qualities the way they wanted to and to turn their skills into talents for the neighborhood by cooperating instead of competing. Furthermore, the talent show had also an impact on local organizations developing training and talent development programs in the area which expressed their intention to collaborate with Freehouse and The Power of Two.
Freehouse intends to repeat the experiment in 2014, by organizing a second edition of The Power of Two, in order to make more neighborhood qualities emerge and to enrich the neighborhood asset of locally manufactured products and services, in collaboration with local media, institutions and organizations.


Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk

Four groups participated in the first edition:

1.
Wellness to You by Inge, Rushen and Vera
Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk

2.
The Storytelling Coat... by Abigail and Michael
Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk

3.
Energy for Life Gardens by Frank, Mandy and Ondrej
Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk

4.
Recycle Rent by Dionysa and Mustafa
Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk


Photo by Peter Zuiderwijk

See Het Wijkwaardenhuis

Project author: Cohabitation Strategies
Project location: Lecce, Italy
Year/s of execution: 2011-2012
Commissioned by: Musagetes (Canada), Loop House and Ammirato Culture House (Italy)
Project’s collaborators: Laura Perrone, Gianluca Marinelli
Guest Artists: Ippolito Chiarello, Kai Zen, Nikolay Oleynikov (Chto Delat? and more), Daniele Pario Perra, Peter Zuiderwijk

Campagna Urbana is a collaborative project between artists, activists, scholars, cultural producers, associations and citizens. It aims to open up new possibilities for social and political engagement in the city of Lecce. Through the use of artistic and cultural activities, artists and citizens work together to reimagine, reclaim and explore their city.
Campagna Urbana was conceived in two public phases. A first phase has been conducted in the Santa Rosa neighborhood, between September and October 2012, with a series of artistic interventions and public actions. The second phase was supposed to sum up the results of the first phase and to translate them into a cultural song, a contemporary reinterpretation of the troubadour tradition. Unfortunately this last phase, planned by the spring 2013, was unexpectedly canceled by Musagetes. You can imagine the disastrous impact this decision had on the inhabitants of the Santa Rosa neighborhood!
While the first phase aimed to understand the local issues and establish relationships with the inhabitants, the second was meant to experiment with new ways of raising awareness about public policy issues and foster creation of alternative models of production of the city generated from the grass roots.
Through these types of intervention, Campagna Urbana seeked to open up the disciplinary boundaries and develop new forms of appropriation of the city. At a time when the economy seems to be the only force for understanding and shaping society, Campagna Urbana had the ultimate goal of challenging the marginalization of culture as an agent of transformation of social relations and the public imagination in the city of Lecce.

Lecce, September & October 2012

The first phase of Campagna Urbana – September and October 2012 – is the dress rehearsal for a public performance by cantastorie (spontaneous entertainers who tell stories and sing songs) to be held next spring. In the Santa Rosa district of Lecce, a series of urban actions and artistic interventions have been held in public spaces in order to understand the local problems, establish ties with the inhabitants, and initiate the process of creating a collective storytelling.
The Urban Actions create a link between the artistic interventions and problems specific to the city through the work of artists in dialogue and partnership with citizens’ groups and associations, whose members are encouraged to become active participants. A collective of artists, activists, sociologists, cultural producers and citizens has the role of producing collaborative platforms by means of visual campaigns, urban actions and the temporary use of public space. The neighbourhood becomes a stage for experimenting with alternative models for imagining, reclaiming and living in the city.
The Urban Actions were open to everyone and free of charge. They ranged from collective writing with Kai Zen to the radical campaign with Peter Zuiderwijk, spontaneous creativity with Daniele Pario Perra, painting as radical activism with Nikolay Oleynikov, and performance and improvisation with Ippolito Chiarello.

See the Campagna Urbana site EN and IT

TheBrantClub, a project by Lucia Babina and Marjetica Potrč, took place 3–9 September 2012 as part of the Musagetes Foundation’s artistic program in Guelph, Canada. The project was conceived and produced during the period when the Guelph-Wellington Rural Urban Program was under way; this was a research program undertaken by the group Cohabitation Strategies and commissioned by Musagetes. The knowledge they assembled was of great help to the project in defining the area of action – the Brant neighbourhood in Guelph – and finalizing the three themes that would be developed through community activities: the natural assets at hand, space-making, and food accessibility. The Brant Club consisted of a program of events that encouraged the local community to rediscover their neighbourhood’s natural assets through excursions within the neighbourhood and to the nearby nature reserve; to rethink the neighbourhood space through group discussions with experts and city officials; and to become more involved in debates over local and organic food production and consumption by introducing Brant residents to the ecological food movement in Guelph. The project’s ultimate goal was to help people play a more active part in reshaping their lives in Brant.

The events took place in the Brant neighborhood in collaboration with the community of Brant:

Nature Club
Two nature walks, one in the Guelph Lake Conservation Area lead by the Gosling Foundation and one in the Brant neighbourhood lead by The Healthy Landscapes Program. The Guelph Lake Conservation Area is only minutes away from the neighbourhood and we found native plants. The second walk looked at natural features in Brant itself. This is an opportunity to think about how we can use the green spaces in the neighbourhood in new ways.


Excursion in the neighborhood.


Excursion in the neighborhood.


Excursion in the neighborhood.


Before starting the excursion in the Guelph Lake Conservation area.

Future Spaces
How can we take back spaces in the neighbourhood? We collected people’s stories, observations and complaints about space regulations in the neighbourhood. We don’t complain enough! How can we have more freedom in our use of spaces? By sharing complaints we can identify what we want to change. We can then transform how we live in the neighbourhood. Residents are the local experts. They shared their knowledge with people who have professional knowledge about bylaws and regulations. Together we thought creatively about how to overcome the regulations and imagine new ways to use the different spaces in the neighbourhood.


The residents of Brant meet with Paul Kraehling, former city planner of Guelph and Brendan Johnson, director of Everdale.



Food Movement
Community Farm? (Dakota Park) What is organic food and how is it grown? Can I grow it myself? Together with Everdale Farms (Organic Farm and Environmental Learning Centre) we imagined the possibilities of growing our own food as a community in Brant. We also celebrated the Brant community with a picnic in Dakota Park. Different vegetables from the community garden, Everdale Farms and preserved food made by Vicki Beard’s family were available for sampling. There was a special performance by local musician James Gordon and the Summer Camp-a- Mania Kids, who sang songs that they wrote together.


Brendan Johnson (right), director of Everdale, Marjetica Potrč (first on the left) and the student Elizabeth Nowatschin discuss about the possibility of a vegetable garden in Dakota Park.


Gayle Goldstone of the Brant neighborhood group with Brendan Johnson and Frank Valeriotte (right), member of Parliament for Guelph.


Picnic in Dakota Park with the community of Brant.


James Gordon (volk singer) sings with Brant kids, with whom created songs about the neighorhood.
Gayle Goldstone, Brant neighborhood group member and community organizer for TheBrantClub.

Brant Mural
The mural was hanged at the front wall of the Brant Avenue Public School. It tells the story of the Brant community, inspired by the growth of the neighbours working together on projects like: Brant Avenue Neighbourhood Group, Peer Leaders, Community Garden, Summer Camp-a-Mania, Garden Fresh, and Community Cafés. It also envisions the future of Brant as reflected in the community’s goals.



After TheBrantClub, the Brant Neighborhood group took the decision to continue the debate about redesigning Dakota Park, whose reorganization was one of the issues raised up during the Future Spaces workshop. They are currently negotiating with the municipality of Guelph the setting up of a vegetable garden and the addition of more facilities for children, in the park.
We would like to thank for making this project possible: Brant Avenue Public School, Brant Avenue Neighbourhood Group, Cohabitation Strategies, Everdale Farms, Guillermo Delgado Castaneda for his contribution to the mural, Healthy Landscapes Program (City of Guelph), Nature in the Neighbourhood (Gosling Foundation), Brant Summer Camp-a-Mania Kids, Upper Grand District School Board, and Vicki Beard.


Flyer announcing TheBrantClub program of events.

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Text written during the preparation of the TheBrantClub.

In November 2011, we went to Guelph to learn about the city, its people, and their concerns. We brought with us knowledge harvested from our experience with the community garden and community kitchen in the Amsterdam project. The key concepts of that project animated our discussions in Guelph and provided a door for understanding the city and its specific rural–urban condition.

Below, the text in italic is adapted from our writings on The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbour1, while the regular text builds on these concepts, comparing the communities in Amsterdam and Guelph and anticipating our contribution to the 1m2 programme.

INTRODUCTION

In 2008, Wilde Westen, a collective of architects, designers, cultural producers and artists (Lucia Babina is one of the members), was asked by a coalition of government bodies, private investors and the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce to discover new economic opportunities for a district in decline: the New West district of Amsterdam. When presenting their research to the project commissioners, Wilde Westen outlined a methodology based on a long-term process of reappropriation, the redefining of community spaces, and the empowerment of local residents. This methodology would involve the participation of local residents and the deregulation of the use of the public space in order to encourage spontaneous initiatives, make room for innovative ideas, and create a sense of belonging among the residents. Unfortunately, Wilde Westen’s proposal was rejected.

Nevertheless, despite this refusal, Wilde Westen still wished to develop this methodology further, for it saw its role as a mediator between the residents and the housing corporations. It was at this moment, in late 2008, that the artist Marjetica Potrč, who had been invited by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to do a site-specific project in the New West district, joined forces with Wilde Westen.

Working together, they conceived and realized the project The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour: a community garden and community kitchen in the New West neighbourhood of Geuzenveld en Slotermeer. They initiated a two-year process of reappropriation and empowerment in what was then the largest redevelopment programme for a residential area in the European Union. At the end of 2009, a community of more than thirty families came together around the garden and the kitchen, with an eight-member committee that cared for the spaces, took pride in keeping the garden and kitchen open, and planned daily gardening and cooking activities, workshops, and a cultural programme for the neighbourhood.

Lucia Babina: The two-year process of the residents’ reappropriation of a garden and a kitchen in Amsterdam proved that our visionary idea was able to bring change. But this change could occur only if people were organized and empowered to transform their lives in the neighbourhood and city where they live. We went to Guelph with the intention of discovering a similar opportunity. In fact, what we found was an interesting community that has already been active for five years in promoting local food production and access to the land, including in the urban area, as a way to improve their living conditions and work toward social justice. We sensed it was important – in order to better understand the rural and urban character of Guelph and eventually to develop a project there – to find out more about the organizations that are most active in this regard, such as the Guelph-Wellington Food Round Table, Everdale, Sustainable Food Systems, Farmstart, and Transition Guelph. The research these groups have done is extraordinary, particularly because it challenges the current local and regional systems of food production and distribution. But this research has not yet concerned itself with the most marginalized members of society. There exists a clear gap between those who are presenting this important struggle for a better future and those who lack even the basic tools to improve their living conditions. This gap triggers our imagination and encourages us to think about a project involving urban rights awareness and social equality.

TURNING PUBLIC SPACE INTO COMMUNITY SPACE

In the 1950s a “garden city”, a Dutch version of modernism, was built on agricultural land west of Amsterdam’s city centre. As with many modernist developments, there was money for the buildings but not for developing the public space, which remained largely open and undefined. This turned out to be a happy accident, since in the 1970s open space represented the open democratic society. During the 1980s, however, this space turned into a no man’s land, and in the 1990s, many of the lots were fenced-off and became “look-only gardens” (kijkgroen). Residents paid for their maintenance but could not enter them. In 2004, facing bankruptcy, the City of Amsterdam handed the space over to housing corporations, an act that sealed the fate of public space in the district.
By engaging the residents of the neighbourhood, the project The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour overturned this perspective. The public space was personalized as community space. The space was not only reclaimed, it was also redefined. But beyond issues of space and place, the project visualized the potential of social architecture; it showed us that not only it was desirable for residents to participate in designing “their” city, it was also possible.

Marjetica Potrč: Can residents of the Brant neighbourhood imagine staying in the neighbourhood and not moving out as soon as their financial situation improves? Can the Brant neighbourhood become their own place, the place they choose to live in and not just a place of transition? Imagine people celebrating living in Brant, celebrating being a citizen of Guelph, celebrating their social contract with the city.
We believe that a community-building project is able to be a tool by which residents reclaim the neighbourhood as their own. Will this be a community garden and community kitchen, as in Amsterdam’s New West? These are already in place, although their existence is fragile. There is talk about using a plot behind the school for a future community centre, but there are financial and organizational obstacles to such plans. Can this empty land become a site for imagining a community space, a tool for reclaiming the neighbourhood? Can residents perform a social architecture, instead of living in what might possibly be container architecture?

The project The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour saw the low-income population of the New West district – mostly immigrant families – as an “added value” for building a sustainable neighbourhood.

MP: What does it mean to be poor? The Brant neighbourhood is the poorest in Guelph, poorer even than the Onward Willow neighbourhood. Although the residents might have similar incomes in the two neighbourhoods, those in Brant are also dealing with intergenerational poverty, which is more resistant to change, while the immigrants in Onward Willow are more curious about things and more open to changing their culture of living. Their involvement in gardening and their participation in many workshops show this. They have not lost their sense of the importance of locally grown food, and they have not forgot the benefits of belonging to a community.

In The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour, we saw that the residents rejected the twentieth-century modernist ideal of the metropolis and instead opted for a city composed of strong, smaller-sized neighbourhoods; in other words, the project proposed shrinking the city into smaller parts.

MP: A neighbourhood is the smallest sustainable element in a city. Brant is a small neighbourhood. But is it too small to construct an identity? Is it too small for residents to feel that they belong to a place? We don’t think so!

RITUAL

We had the choice of simply developing a depoliticized art project about urban green space, with the inevitable result of its being instrumentalized, or of creating a different kind of engagement in which cooking and growing vegetables served as rituals by which residents established roots in the neighbourhood, as forms of resistance against a forced nomadism – against the unending cycle of evictions and relocations.

LB: You have to engage in the society in order to change something. I don’t believe in autonomous art. But I do believe in independent thinking. Art should reflect reality and respond to it with provocation, reflection, questioning, or simply action that repeats itself as ritual. The messages rituals deliver are always embedded in the society and are renewed every time the ritual is performed. What kind of rituals need to be rediscovered in the Brant and Onward Willow communities? And what messages need to be questioned?

One of most striking things we learned from The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour was the importance of ritual for the community that tended the garden. For them, community was an organism: they worked on the land together. Working together was an act of empowerment through which they were intuitively reclaiming their community, their neighbourhood, and their city. They worked on the land not only to grow food for themselves, but also to “ground” themselves.

MP: We were told that the residents of the Brant neighbourhood did not want to take part in the planned workshops. Can the Brant residents learn through play by becoming involved in a ritual? In this way they would develop new perspectives; they would learn from each other and from people from outside the neighbourhood. They would construct new knowledge. Ritual can be a path toward the residents' empowerment.

COMMUNITY-BUILDING AND THE SURVIVAL OF CITIES

The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour proved that residents care about their neighbourhood, that over time they can develop a sense of ownership, that they have the right to construct their livelihood according to their own cultural expectations. They deserve the chance to decide where and how they want to live.

LB: The issue is to be able to articulate your rights in an urban environment. For this to happen, a community first has to take shape and organize itself. In this process, which is a process of empowerment, a sense of ownership of the place in which the community lives must develop and take root. The Onward Willow and Brant neighbourhoods are considered two of the most fragile areas in Guelph. The inhabitants are encouraged by the city and NGOs to participate in vegetable gardening and other activities in order to strengthen community cohesion and improve living conditions. But during our visits we saw that the residents are not yet fully empowered to decide how they want to live. These two neighbourhoods present compelling cases in which we can develop a “relational object” that residents interact with and that will eventually become a tool they use to change their culture of living. In the case of The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour, the relational object was the community garden and community kitchen.

If people can survive in the cities, the cities will survive as well. Community-building is not a utopian project; it is a much-needed laboratory of coexistence.

MP: Cities need strong neighbourhoods in order to survive. Residents establish strong neighbourhoods when they think of their neighbourhood not as a place of passage but as a place where they wish to remain. Residents are empowered when they belong to a place. Indeed, a group is more likely to be recognized by the society if they have their own physical place. The sense of belonging to a place is important for another reason as well: those who belong to a place become a nucleus that can resist shocks from the outside, but they can also reach out to others – and this is only natural.

URBAN–RURAL COEXISTENCE

With its focus on local food production and neighbourhood development, The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour redefined the state of urban–rural coexistence. We were proud that the community garden and community kitchen generated new connections between neighbours and between the neighbourhood and the municipality.

MP: It is inspiring to see how many people in Guelph are concerned about local food production and the kind of neighbourhood development that involves food, such as raising the quality of food for poorer residents. By doing so, they are redefining the state of urban–rural coexistence in a mid-sized city surrounded by farmlands, one that is now more aware than ever of its vital dependence on the natural environment. On the neighbourhood level, a community garden generates new connections between neighbours. With The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour, we saw how a successful community project can influence other communities to follow its example and adopt similar practices. It is natural for people to learn from each other. All in all, we see a new culture of living being generated by the citizens of Guelph – one example is the current Transition Guelph initiative, which aims to make Guelph a Fair Trade city. Guelph is a city in transformation.

LB: In Guelph, the rural and the urban coexist both naturally and historically. But it was only five years ago that Guelph started a conscious process of recovering and rediscovering its roots and character. What does the urban–rural dichotomy mean today for a mid-sized city like Guelph?

PLACE-MAKING

MP: Our experience with The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour gave us a better understanding of the importance of space and place-making. People occupy a space in an act of place-making. They seek to do this again and again, but there are always different issues involved. Can they rent a place? What are the laws? Do they need external assistance? Once they have a space, can they manage it and be in control? Is it possible to achieve the legal control of a place as a community? Space – a concept that initially sounds so abstract – acquires a body when we think of the community ownership of a place and the right of access to land. Can public space – a concept that was celebrated in the 20th century – be transformed into community space in the 21st century?
But when we talk about a community claiming a place, we must not forget, first of all, that a community is formed through its members’ involvement with a relational object. Community-building and place-making are closely related.

LB: Is it not time to abandon the notion of “publicness” and think again about alternative collective ways to build the spatial and social environments we want? Is there not a compelling need to radicalize the use of space and, instead of talking about new forms of coexistence, look for new forms of co-ownership?

COLLECTIVE ACTION DEVELOPS CRITICAL MASS

We decided to build our project by relying on our skills, bringing together our diverse knowledge and various convictions. We had a lot of visionary ideas and a methodology that had to be put to the test for the first time.

LB: We have a vision for Guelph – we have a vision for the Brant and Onward Willow neighbourhoods. This vision has met with certain criticism and concerns, but it has also sparked enthusiasm. We thought it would be good to start by challenging the already-existing resources and letting ourselves imagine a scenario in which we collaborate with residents, local institutions, independent organizations, and Musagetes to define and build alternative models of coexistence.

MP: Yes, it is important to have a vision.

The success of The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour was partly due to our collaboration with the most important contemporary art institution in Amsterdam: the Stedelijk Museum, which understood and agreed with our approach. The fact that such an influential institution was involved in the project opened up new opportunities and made it easier for us to achieve our goals.

LB: We believe that despite the difficulties of getting a project to work in Brant or Onward Willow, most obstacles can be overcome by working together with the residents, Musagetes, the city, the Food Round Table, other concerned organizations, and local experts. In The Cook, the Farmer, his Wife and their Neighbour, we learned that working across disciplinary and institutional borders opened up unexpected ways to realize challenging ideas.

“Redirective Practice” is a kind of collective action that demonstrates the process of cultural remaking. Consider the vast number of bottom-up initiatives across the world – they make us ask whether, taken all together, a critical mass is developing. When something has stopped working, people develop new practices. New practices are important.

BUT IS IT ART?

Typically, art-viewers coming over from the Stedelijk enjoyed seeing The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour, but they were also puzzled, for this functional project did not offer them any sort of object they could identify as “art”. Standing in the middle of the vegetable garden, they felt a little bit lost among the neighbourhood residents who were working on the land; they would turn to others from their group and ask – the way you do when you want to hear your own question reflected back to you – “Is this art?” We, however, saw nothing especially controversial here and were surprised when the question kept bouncing back to us. We had no trouble seeing the “object”, only it wasn’t an “object sculpture” – it was a relational object.

We believe in the beauty of art and the role of art in society. People need art. It mediates their relationship with the world. LB: But what is the difference between an artistic project that produces a community garden and a community kitchen and some other kind of social project? Is it the artist’s touch?

MP: Artists think outside the box, they open new perspectives. A gardener thinks about the plants. We artists thought of a garden as a community-building element: the garden was a tool for empowering the community and its understanding and interaction with their city.

GRAND AND SMALL-SCALE UTOPIAS

Joseph Beuys believed in the power of human creativity and in art’s ability to foster revolutionary change. Is it possible that his vision has taken root and that we are living it today? Not his grand utopian vision, perhaps, but a down-to-earth modest version of it, something that belongs to the real world.

LB: Victor Burgin has a point here: “The aspirations of those who would isolate art from the social world are analogous to those of Kant’s dove, which dreamed of how much freer its flight could be if only it were released from the resistance of the air. If we are to learn any lesson from the history of the past fifty years of art, it is surely that an art unattached to the social world is free to go anywhere but that it has nowhere to go.”2

RELATIONAL OBJECT

This “something that belongs to the real world” we call a “relational object”. For those of us who are directly involved, it is a physical, bodily experience: we carry heavy bricks up the hill of a barrio or get our hands dirty planting vegetables in a community garden. We know that if you want to bring change to society, it is not enough just to talk.

MP: What will serve as a relational object for the neighbourhood in Guelph?

THE ARTIST AS MEDIATOR

In a time of collaboration, the artist is a mediator and the role of art is to mediate.

We, Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen, chose to work behind the scenes and to create a space where the community could settle. We made ourselves invisible and encouraged the local residents to become the protagonists of a process of change.

LB: The artist chooses to be a mediator, to leave the stage to the community of residents. The role of the artist is to trigger small invisible changes which lead to a more conscious sense of belonging and the residents’ affirmation of their rights. The task of the artist is to gradually detach herself from the project and let the community become the sole protagonist. But there will most likely be mistakes, and it is hard for a project not to be touched by the consequences of the mistakes that occur in the process.

By reaching out to the community in a shared endeavour, the artist and art become engaged in social processes that aspire to transform society from below. Along the way, the artist loses the aura of individual authorship and art loses its objectness.

MP: Art gains in the end. The community garden in The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour was an art project that people understood and interacted with. It brought a new perspective to what a garden can be and do. The general public accepted institutional critique as art some time ago. Now, the public is struggling to recognize community-based projects as art. The culture of living is in transformation and community-based art projects reflect this. Contemporary art, after all, must be based in contemporary culture.

The notion of art as mediation is disturbing to some in the contemporary art public. The controversy is more about the degree to which art and artists should get directly involved in society. Community-based projects feel too up-close and messy. They lack the safe distance of an institutional critique. What is interesting, however, is that both strategies have the same goal – to bring about social change.

MP: The main question is: what is contemporary culture, not what is art. Art depends on culture. Art as a relational object is a tool for changing the culture.

Lucia Babina and Marjetica Potrč, 2011

FOOTNOTES

1 The non-italic passages have been excerpted (with minor changes) from: Lucia Babina, “The Invisible Change” (2010); Marjetica Potrč, “Is This Art? – The Relational Object in a Shared Space” (2010); and Marjetica Potrč, “Participatory Design” (2011).
2 Victor Burgin, “Work and Commentary” (1973), Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings, ed. Alexander Streitburger (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), pp. 40–41.

The Market Academy Naschmarkt is a research project by Lucia Babina and Henriette Waal that addresses the Naschmarkt, the “monumental” market of Vienna, as it was designed by the architect Otto Wagner in the first decade of the Twentieth century.
Naschmarkt demands for a transformation in order to survive. A radical change needs a cultural revolution that springs and develops from inside the market, from the market’s people, who are the “experts” of a market in transition. It requires a collective effort that entitles them to create the conditions for a transformation, which empowers them to redefine a market system and new parameters of sustainability.
The Market Academy Naschmarkt is an experimental factory for the invention of new practices and the stimulus of new forms of entrepreneurial attitudes. It is an engaging instrument, encouraging market people to come together and to make space for a collective regeneration of the market.
We would like to thank: Marjetica Potrč, Birgit Lurz, Wolfgang Schlag, Edith Spira, Tateus, Mario Berber, Maincz, Daniela & Erwin Gegenbauer, Amoni and Julia, Oemer Karagoez, Goekhan Umar, Ibrahim Shebahim, Ahmad, Helge Mooshammer & Peter Moertenboeck, Peter Kleinhans, Andreas Weber, Angelika Herburger, Barbara Neuroth, Manfred Rakousky, Kili Schmidt, Lisa-Yvonne Heimgartner, Lucas Woerdehoff, Carmen Rueter, Hannes Schreckensberger, Goetz Bury, Christian Daschek, Bernhard, Mina, Gehsteig Guerrilleros, Elke Krasny, WochenKlausur, Gerald Nestler.
The Market Academy Naschmarkt was inaugurated the 29th May 2010, in the Naschmarkt (Vienna) on occasion of the exhibition Into the City - Im Paradiesgarten (29 May - 5 June 2010), as part of the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), curated by Birgit Lurz. It launched 5 actions: MAN-Reception, MAN-Knoedel Fakultaet, MAN-Talks, MAN-Pamphlet, MAN-Drechsler.



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Urban Union is a project by Cohabitation Srategies, a Rotterdam based cooperative for socio-spatial development that focuses its actions, designs and research inside the conditions of conflict and exclusion of the contemporary city. It is part of a long-term research focusing on 'segregation'in the neighborhood of Tarwewijk (Rotterdam, NL).
Urban Union is an experimental urban research program grounded in the district of Tarwewijk in the south of Rotterdam, yet with a focus on the broader influences and implications of the overall urban scale of The Netherlands. The program will define in the process a common ground for progressive academic research and neighbourhood-based action research. The objective is to construct a unitary understanding of the city informing the design of carefully calibrated urban strategies that empower citizens in becoming active participants in the making of their environment. The unitary understanding provides also socially responsible recommendations, direction and reform strategies to the different organizations in charge of urban development.
The research was launched by a three-days event The Other City: Exposing Tarwewjik (9-11 December 2009) encompassing a series of public workshops, excursions and presentations were prepared with the goal of discussing possibilities to design alternative cohabitation models, stimulate difference in socio-spatial relations and construct parallel local economies in Tarwewijk, a vulnerable and segregated neighborhood in the south of Rotterdam included in this year’s list of the 40 most ‘problematic’ neighborhoods of the Netherlands. This neighborhood is an exemplary urban case study that reflects the socio-spatial casualties of the Dutch neoliberal trend of urbanization.

Invited contributors at the The Other City: Exposing Tarwewjik event were: Alonso Ayala, Wim Blauw, Libia Castro, Aetzel Griffioen, Vinca Kruk, Ólafur Ólafsson, Thomas Purcell, Erik Swyngedouw, Daniel van der Velden, Piet Vollard, Gon Zifroni.
This event was part of the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam Open City Event Program.
Exposing Tarwewjik has been produced with the support of Nederlands Architectuurinstituut, Eric Dullaert from Cultureel Denkwerk, Deelgemeente Charlois, Woonstad, dS+V, Berlage Institute, IHS and ART Hotel Rotterdam.


Download the research in preparation of the The Other City: Exposing Tarwewjik event.

Talking About! is a program from 6th to 19th September 2009 that brings six artists and cultural producers from Cameroon to the Netherlands. The guests are:
- Ruth Belinga (artist, curator, Yaoundé)
- Goddy Leye (artist, founder of artist’s initiative Art Bakery, Douala)
- Hervé Youmbi (artist, member of the collective Cercle Kapsiki, Douala)
- Achillekà Komguen (artist, editor of newspaper Diartgonale, Yaoundé)
- Lionel Manga (writer, Douala)
Achille Atina (cultural mediator, Douala)

The first week involves visits to a number of Dutch art institutions and initiatives, providing our guests with an overview of the Dutch cultural scene. Interspersed within these visits there have been several moments of discussion, open to the public or to an invited audience. These events have been hold at:
- Rijksakademie, Amsterdam
- Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
- WORM, Rotterdam
- Stroom, The Hague
- Enough Room For Space, Rotterdam
- Attent, Rotterdam

For the second week, each guest has been introduced to a “host”, an institution or organization with whom they could work with a view to exchanging information and ideas. This placement is designed to give a framework to the visit and to facilitate possibilities for the dialogues that take place during Talking About! to continue after our guests have returned home. The hosts are the following initiatives/institutions:
- Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam
- Duende, Rotterdam
- FGA Magazine, Rotterdam
- iStrike Foundation, Rotterdam
- Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
- Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

The objectives of Talking About! are:
- Starting a peer-to-peer dialogue between professionals with various backgrounds and experiences whose activities and projects are influenced by – and are able to affect – the diverse contexts in which they operate.
- The challenging or opening up of established ways of thinking.
- Recognizing the equal value of their different expertise and practices and drawing upon that knowledge as a possible starting point for productive confrontation and exchange.
- Creating a network of interested parties who might want to develop further collaborations in the future, depending on their individual interests, possibilities, and connections.
- Establishing an alternative form of cross-cultural interaction.
- Avoiding a purely Euro-centric way of thinking and the all too common paternalism still present in European cultural projects linked to Africa.

Talking About! was intended to be - and became - a platform of discussion for the participants (guests, hosts) and the audience of Rotterdam. In order to give relevance to what happened during Talking About! and to further encourage a discussion, Fucking Good Art (Rotterdam) and DIARTgonale (Douala) are creating a joint edition of their magazines dedicated to this experience. The publication is coming out at the end of Februrary 2010.

Talking About! is a project of Lucia Babina and Zoe Gray and is supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, Dienst Kunst en Cultuur (Rotterdam) and the Centrum voor Beelende Kunst (Rotterdam).