In this critical session, focused on the survival and evolution of alternative cultural spaces, reflecting on how these communal hubs are adapting to the rapid changes and environmental, political, and social threats, often on the frontlines of change in the current climate. This hybrid session examined some of the specific challenges relevant to grassroots and community-driven cultural spaces in this moment: conflict and occupation, cultural oppression, issues of equity, physical displacement, economic instability, and lack of physical space. Cultural leaders joined our discussion from spaces across the globe, sharing progressive approaches, creative strategies, and efficient tactics their communities have developed in the face of adversity. Together, we reflected on some of the varied vulnerabilities and opportunities unique to alternative cultural spaces, and considered new framings of audience, care, and even “culture”, in the context of crisis.

AMY GOTTUNG is a creative producer, programmer, and consultant currently based in Canada, on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations She has worked with and for community-driven cultural projects and organizations for over a decade, in varying capacities: as an independent producer, a consultant and advocate, and as former ED Long Winter, Toronto’s all-ages, PWYC music and art series. Amy is the founder of several cross-sector interventions and international exchanges in support of “alternative” scenes and spaces, including a festival and research conference, co-presented by Long Winter (Toronto) and La Station Gare des Mines (Paris) in 2021, and the DIY Space Project: a multi-city capacity- and network-building project for independent cultural spaces. She is one of eight core partners organizing Alter-Places.

OLUMOROTI (MOROTI) SOJI-GEORGE is a curator, writer and educator based in Vancouver, BC. He is the curator at the Black Arts Centre in Surrey, BC and the director/curator of Gallery Gachet in Downtown Vancouver. His research and curatorial practice primarily involve envisioning accessible and community-centred art spaces and highlighting the stories of individuals and communities who construct new ways of being that challenge the Western status quo.  At the core of his practice is the belief that space could be used to reflect the agency and lived experiences of individuals whose bodies and identities are not typically valued, respected and represented in traditional art and academic settings. Through an exploration of language, the archive, lens-based works, history and cultural theory, Olumoroti's curatorial practice is grounded in a passion for non-hierarchical epistemological production that could contribute to the creation of a pathway where new approaches to cultural production and the politics that fuel the ways different bodies perceive and understand the world could emerge. 

Gallery Gachet - https://www.instagram.com/gallerygachet/ 
The Black Arts Centre - https://www.instagram.com/theblackartscentre/ 

IAIN DACE, formerly a troubadour and Englishman, is now Swedish and the chair of NGBG, a voluntary organisation that arranges events and campaigns for the right of grassroots cultural actors to access public spaces. The organisation is fully transparent, radically inclusive, hyperlocal, directly democratic, and focussed on organic and sustainable growth. Its biggest successes so far are the yearly NGBG Gatufest and the campaign to designate the neighbourhood as a Kulturljudzon where industry and culture can make noise without complaints from residents. Coming Events include an Artbike Parade, NGBG Gatufest (a one day non-profit festival which started in 2016 and in 2023 brought 50 000 people to the neighbourhood featuring hyperlocal artists and creative), and co-working and skill sharing events (artbike construction, improvising spontaneous concerts and dialogues, a female handicrafts workshop). Current research projects include “Listen” with Malmö, Genk and Voralberg - Driving Urban Transitions - using radio station, maps and games as a method for including unheard voices in the development of the neighbourhood, and Alterplaces, with Paris, Berlin, Kyiv, Zagreb, Toronto, exploring the sustainability and resilience of independent culture houses.

http://www.kulturljudzon.se/
https://www.gatufest.se/
https://www.facebook.com/NGBG2024/
https://www.instagram.com/norra_grangesbergsgatan/

ANNA KARNAUKH is a cofounder and director of Lanka.pro collective (www.lanka.pro). Lanka.pro is a team of four female cofounders focused on creative economy development in Ukraine and ecosystemic solutions inspired by culture. Its main areas of work include: designing projects, facilitation, research, education and capacity building. Established in 2022, Lanka.pro operates in Kyiv and Lviv. Till early 2024 Anna led the creative economy portfolio at the British Council in Ukraine. In 2017-2020 she was the Programme Lead for EU-funded Culture Bridges programme. As a freelance project expert, Anna collaborated among others with the European Commission, Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and Cultural Relations Platform. In 2023-2024 Anna was the fellow of Vidnova Lab programme focusing on prototyping solutions for harmonious recovery of Ukraine, in which Anna’s theme was the cultural infrastructure at the local level in Ukraine. 

Lanka.pro - www.lanka.pro
https://www.linkedin.com/company/lankaua/
Anna (LinkedIn) -  https://www.linkedin.com/in/akarnaukh/

NATASSA DOURIDA is a structural Engineer ( NTUA, 2008) with an MSCArch in Restorations of Monuments (NTUA 2013). As a Fellow at the Robert Bosch foundation ( StArt, 2015) , she trained in cultural management and submitted the concept of a sociocultural experiment related to the motivation of creative communities to cooperate with the owners of the 11.000 abandoned heritage buildings of Athens towards reviving the heritage building stock of the city. She was the initiator of the community development project , Communitism (2015) which evolved into the association of Communitism (2017), operating the first sociocultural center of Athens. It was established in a neoclassical building of 1928 in Metaxourghio neighborhood, entrusted to them by the owners in exchange of its maintenance. The center acted for 6 years as an axis for the cultural commons of the Athens, developing self governance and economic models combining the multiple realities of the city and the communities’ needs. As the period 2017-2023 resulted in a proof of concept considered worthy and viable, the association’s vision is to multiply the model in as many of the city’s unutilized neoclassical buildings, currently researching on applicability of sustainable solutions such as models of collective ownership. Natassa Dourida is also active in the Board of the Greek association Culture for Change, the union of cultural managers and social innovators of Greece. She recently became a member of Trans Europe Halle’s Executive Committee.

https://communitism.space/
https://www.instagram.com/communitism/?hl=en
https://www.facebook.com/communitism/
https://medium.com/@communitism

Quotes have been edited for readability and flow.

"Communitism was driven by necessity, really, and by crisis itself – be it the economic crisis of Greece or the refugee crisis. We attracted big queer communities that did not have safe spaces around the city. We were able to coordinate collectively.”

"Gachet essentially emerged out of a mental health crisis here in Vancouver, Canada. Gachet is located in the Downtown Eastside, which is home to a large number of Vancouver's marginalized and dispossessed peoples. These are primarily individuals who are Black and Indigenous, individuals who live with drug addiction and who suffer with mental health struggles, [a crisis to which we are] losing lives every day.”

“We are building a new strategy on collective ownership. This is part of our campaign stating that we need to take care of the city. We envision a city where we can take care of each other, and the buildings themselves.”

“The day after Christmas I got a message from the landlord [informing us] that we have to move out in three months. Our access was blocked to the shared website that we, the City Hall and the landlords were using, and the social media accounts that they started.”

Community power, at scale, can be perceived as a threat by authorities: “They still haven't told us why, what the problem is, but it sort of feels like they think we're a bit too woke or I don't know, bad? We're trying to work out what we did wrong and we're trying to find a way to continue. What [the City] wants us to do at the moment is to rip up the permits, which we sensibly already applied for last year [. . .] I can't stop them taking the farm away but I'm pretty sure that I can stop them taking the festival and turning it into a commercial festival rather than a community festival. I think in a way it would have been better it had been less successful – if I still had 4,500, 10,000, even 15,000 people attending that festival, there [may not be] the commercial incentive to kick us out the room.”

“A large focus for me [as a curator] has been to try and combine lived experience in every way that it presents itself  – lived experience through theory, lived experience through practice – all while trying to engage with opportunities within the Downtown Eastside, [which I do by] curating exhibitions that speak broadly but also particularly to the states of the [neighbourhood]: to issues such as dispossession, identity, drug use and organizing within the community, but also allowing space, curating exhibitions, and creating workshops where residents of the Downtown Eastside can essentially utilize art as a means to embody their individual agency and to visualize their collective and individual experiences in this place.”

“Basically we don't curate. I appreciate curation, I think it's a good thing in most circumstances, but our policy is just to open, accept applications, build as many stages as we can get financing to do, and not really care about how good people are in the sense that if you want to play, you play; you want to paint, you paint . . . We do it for the artists and not for the audiences.”

“Every person in Ukraine goes through stress and mental health deterioration but for cultural workers it is like double because [. . . you are working with] people who are going through mental health issues, but you also have your own mental health [to deal with].”

“Some of us carry a little bit of guilt that we brought gentrification to the neighbourhood, but I don't believe that. I believe that [gentrification] is a much more consistent plan that has to do with Acropolis and [being a] big international capital. I think that we are just a contingency really that happened to be there. We make things more colourful but [the city] would do it anyway.”

“I think that it is important sometimes to kind of use the systems of power and these standards they create to turn it against them [. . . The City] is talking about giving cultural institutions [in our neighbourhood] money so that we can [. . .] cater to tourists, that kind of stuff and I said this is great thank you, but at the same time what does it mean for the residents of the Downtown Eastside? I was able to [use the dialogue to shed some] light into what I know is going on and how the gallery has been trying to cater to it.”

We are fighting to stay in place so as to “shape the narrative even a little bit ourselves, and [to maintain] space in the neighbourhood that we love [and] that we feel is ours, to have agency and ownership.”

Some say, “Hey man, you should come out to the countryside [ . . . there is] less competition in the countryside and it's true, we could rebuild the organisation somewhere else more easily, but I don't think that's what we want to do. I think we have to try and stay in place as long as possible.”

“When the war starts and people gather in your space that's a shining example that you are a [genuine] community organization. There are hundreds of organizations in Ukraine that during the first days of the full-scale invasion by Russia became those places where people slept, were programming shows by themselves, studied online and so on.”

“...a lot of people here have nowhere else to go. There are not social services that cater to the number of people in need and this is genuinely, literally their home. There are people who have been here for longer than I have been alive, and so the idea of going away from the Downtown Eastside is out of the question [. . . We have] essentially opened our doors to people and organisations in the Downtown East Side to host meetings in our space, host workshops in our space, and have a place that is a bit separate from everyone and everywhere else, where we can kind of meet and discuss and plan together and I think this has really embedded us within the community and caused people to trust us in a way that I don’t think they trust the other cultural institutions in the area.”

Cultural organizations “don’t often try to explain their work from a deeper perspective [for example] how do you impact territorial development, how do you impact the well-being of your community and your people, how do you influence entrepreneurship in your region, how do you make your territory more attractive? [. . .] Policy makers need to understand [. . . that] culture does all this. It’s important for us to use that language in speaking about our work, I think it can trigger many changes.”

Collaboration across sectors: “In these polycrisis times you cannot survive just by yourself. What you need to do is to really think not only about yourself and not even only about other culture centres but about a wider ecosystem: to consider who is there. By strengthening the sector, you strengthen yourself. [I’m proposing] looking more holistically at different types of collaborations as opposed to just thinking about developing your organization.”

“[. . .] as grantees of IZOLYATSIA, ZMINA 2.0 project [. . .] we brought together representatives from culture and from different sectors like business, IT and psychology to work on solutions for improving mental health inspired by culture.”

“[. . .]  the important thing that really differentiates one cultural organization from the other is intention. [For me that has involved . . .] making sure that we are properly engaging with the artists and the community members that we are bringing into the gallery, resulting in people understand[ing] the stakes of the times [. . . and developing a] broader understanding of practices of care that could help us move towards [a more desirable] life.”

The gallery ”has built a solid reputation over the years as a serious cultural institution, so [this reputation] is part of what I use as leverage for the community members, in the sense that if you want to support Gachet, you also quite literally need to support other social services in the Downtown Eastside, like the Women's Centre and the Indigenous Cultural Centre.”

“The group of bohemians that founded our original space “were well-travelled, well-educated, yet had chosen to be in Athens during the darkest periods [of the crisis] because they believed in the opportunities it can create, even in terms of creating new meanings, from the basis of neglect and abandonment.”

“With public funding, industrial land and voluntary workforce, all these different communities managed to come together without too much conflict, based on [the premise] we would be independent, we would respect each other, tolerate each other, there would be freedom of expression and freedom of association. The festival is non-profit, it's open call, hyper-local, radically diverse, no tickets, no fences, no headliners.”

“I think it is important to build multiple entry points into anything that we are doing and to make sure that people feel seen, and finally that we consider our notions of power: how we think power presents itself, and our own reactions and engagements with power, especially within a multicultural culture. I think that it's time for us to think about what power we have and what power we don't have and how we can exchange from whatever position that we find ourselves.”

“I have been able to build community with my people here in Vancouver, but I'm interested in thinking about what it could look like globally with a global network of artists and thinkers who are working outside of the institution, working outside of academia and using these things to better ourselves and the people that we care about and the general public.”