Urban composition – Artists, publics and social-spatial transformation

Urban Composition – artists, publics and social-spatial transformation 

 

The governmentalization of the right to the city, evident in such treatise as the World Social Forum's World Charter for the Right to the City, sustains a hierarchical view of the implementation of rights that sits in competition with the ethos of many self organized social movements. Lefebvre's affirmation of self-management ('autogestion'), organized as an alternative making of social space, intended to be read critically against such mechanisms, cannot but be seen now within the framework of capital's accommodation and recognition of self-management as a tool in the profitable inculcation of immaterial labour. Yet the terms of self-management that Lefebvre proposed are being practiced consistently. This sense of alternative practices of rights that works through and beyond the aesthetic and economic tools of capitalism forms the basis of our paper, which is drawn from our experience of curating Social Housing-Housing the Social (Amsterdam Nov 2011) within the context of public art commissioning.

As curators and theorists we are increasingly concerned with assumptions made within the cultural industries that art both contributes to new modes of thinking in Lefebvrian ways (imbricated, participatory, collective) and contributes significantly to urban economic transformation. This paper will examine some of the contradictions implicit in such an observation through case studies of artists and art collectives working critically with housing and property ownership, including Thomas Hirshhorn, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Recht auf der Stadt and the artists involved in Occupy Amsterdam.

Just as Lefebvre understood urbanism not as a fact but as a practice of recomposition, so the artists we will analyze in this paper are aiming to work beyond the confines of their autonomously understood position towards collective projects in which their invention comes in the form of creative reinterpretations of legal, political, discursive and access-based making.

http://www.skor.nl/nl/site/item/social-housing-housing-the-social