We Built This City
Incentivising citizens to be co-creators in their own neighbourhoods, how important is the art of city making?
words – eleanor pender
location – bristol, england
I’m sitting in the Saint-Ferréol Church in the harbour of Marseille. Before me is what looks like a painting in a narrow window frame: Strata #4, commissioned by the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille. Works by Van Dyck and Rubens fill the frame, the canvas, but this is no painting. As the image moves across the works of art, the surface rises and falls – creating peaks and troughs, playing with the very composition of these great masters. Beautiful photography documents a companionship and a collision between classical art and contemporary abstraction.
Art can be transformative. Art can be questioning. When you leave an artwork behind and return to your day, the art stays in your mind unbeknownst to you. The questions it raised, the emotions it moved dance in the back of your mind. You sit with friends in a bar. You debate and discuss. Opinions fly back and forth over large glasses of Rioja, schooners of ale and G&Ts. You become angry, demanding answers for political situations, the lack of a cultural response and, Why can’t people just do something about it?
But when the haze dissipates, when the talk is done and the night has ended, where do the emotions go? Art forces us to ask the difficult questions, but when the art is no longer there where do these questions come from? As citizens, when are we asked questions of our home? How much do we participate and engage with our cities, our neighbourhoods, our countries?
Part of Marseille art festival “Revelations”, Strata #4 brought together traditional beauty of the 1600s and current day digital innovation to ponder just such questions. Digital and urban art were scattered all across the city as part of the festival. In the squares, the streets and public buildings, citizens were invited to explore – taking the ‘parcours’ and experiencing it all for themselves. An immersive technical lab was opened up for public participation where anyone could take part with any level of skill and learn how to create an open source lamp. These City Light Devices were miniature models based on the work of Antoine Schmitt and his city light orchestra.
If this opportunity to create and participate was presented to you, would you take it?
How much do we participate and engage with our cities, our neighbourhoods, our countries?
Taking a closer look, the City Light Devices are essentially a tool to encourage and explore participation within the city. Such engagement is all possible because of Future DiverCities, an elaborate and ambitious collaborative project crossing two continents. 10 partners from different areas of expertise – from electronic arts to contemporary arts festivals, from tech innovation to city making, from social inclusion to city council – have come together with the support of Creative Europe to explore and experiment with creativity in urban spaces and what that means to us, the citizens. The local meets the international. Project partner ANTI Festival – based in Kuopio, Finland – is a leading example of a contemporary arts organisation that looks to its own local environment while thinking internationally.
“When you work in the urban context with any form that has participation embedded in the artistic process, or the work, it’s always important to start with the local context,” says ANTI Festival founder and director Johanna Tuukkanen.
“For Future DiverCities, it’s crucial that the partners are all different and that we don’t even try to be the same because our cities and contexts are so different. In a project like this, it’s crucial to embrace the diversity of each city and each partnership.”
Tuukanen is an artist and curator working in performance, dance and contemporary art. She was the first Arts Programme Manager for Dance House Helsinki (2014-16) and returned to Kuopio to direct ANTI Festival – now 15 years old and firmly established as a contemporary arts festival with an international reputation.
Kuopio, the ninth city in Finland with a population of over 112,000 people, has a strong art and cultural infrastructure with an established city theatre, an orchestra, contemporary arts museum, photography museum and more. Back in the early 2000s, these institutions were well known whilst the freelance and experimental scene struggled to catch up. The idea for ANTI was born: to create events that happen in different spaces across the city and outside of the more established institutions. For Tuukanen, this relationship with the city and with the people is at the heart of ANTI, as well as Future DiverCities.
“When we started out, the idea was quite simply to activate city spaces; utilising public space in the city for art. We wanted to explore the city and use strange forgotten spaces, like a staircase in the middle of a forest, while also using more central spaces like the market square. It was a way to explore and use the city spaces differently, bringing them to life with all kinds of art – live performance art, installation, media, choreography – and as an international festival we were able to introduce alternative methods to artists sharing diverse ways to explore their art.”
ANTI, meaning ‘gift’ in Finnish, chooses to take place in the Autumn months after the busy Summer festivals are over. In the darker weather, it’s a quieter time of year, which makes it all the more interesting to have a free arts festival hosting events in a tax office or a hairdressers.
“I’m currently studying a PhD on curatorial practices in public art, so this relates very closely to not just what we do at ANTI but also the core of Future DiverCities,” Tuukanen continues. “It’s very clear that this type of curatorial practice, tailoring to the people, is very deeply embedded in the city, in the local context, the local networks, the local communities and connections. You have the global art world, but it really is all about the local connection.”
Such balance between local and global is central to Future DiverCities. With project partners spread across Europe and Canada with a range of expertise, it is clear to see that everyone will have some small impact on each other over the lifetime of the project. With the second year of the project having just begun, Tuukanen is already discovering new experiences to take away.
“For me, the experience that I have from Future DiverCities events – like the event in Marseille – remind me it’s really nice to be able to discover a city, the urban context and different communities, through art. It offers a different kind of map of the city. It’s not the tourist map leading you to the obvious attractions, it’s an alternative map to find out something about the local context with the artist, with these communities and these artworks. I really love that.”
Having art show the way, engaging with the diversity of city spaces and communities, is a charming way to explore a new city. It feels more like a personal invitation rather than the usual exploration of landmarks. One month, you’re walking through the streets of Marseille with light and sound art in the square next to you. Another time, you’re in Bergen exploring space and perspective with drones, looking down on the world and realising quite how small we are in the overall picture.
“I think the fact that we are so diverse – the way the lab in Bergen was very different to the one in Marseille – this works for us, this is the strength of the project. It makes us think harder about the artistic activities of Future DiverCities. I think it’s really interesting, because we’re presented with this challenge. We have these general objectives of the project – to explore creativity in the urban context – but how do we embed this thinking in the local context, in the local knowledge? These questions are very important. The fact that everyone involved in the project interprets the objectives into activities that are quite diverse is a sign of good curatorial practice that is ethical towards the local context.”
The idea of citizenship, of participation, is about people actively taking a role – and accessibility can define that whole experience.
With the emphasis firmly placed on local, on the individual when it comes to interlacing artistic experiences with citizens, the question becomes about who you are engaging with and where are they from. Tuukanen asks herself, how do we choose which community to work with? If we choose one, why not the one next door? If we work with those who are interested in the event, who in the room feels welcome? The idea of citizenship, of participation, is about people actively taking a role – and accessibility can define that whole experience.
“I think about the question of citizenship when we are working with participatory activities, bringing people into the experience. Working with different communities across Kuopio, the challenge is how we reach people and reflect the diversity of the city. So participants are not always the same age group or the same ethnic background, so that there is a diversity in that.”
Spaces in cities are everywhere – squares, stairwells, roads, underpasses, pavements, buildings – and whether art is there or not, people will pass through these spaces. But how do they engage with them? Can art take people that one step further, allowing and encouraging them to take something away from a space having contributed to an artistic activity? Tuukanen is all for the artist as the agent of change that leads to urban engagement.
“When people participate in a potentially political artwork, this can change their understanding of the city. It can expand their idea of public space, how they think of public space – what is allowed and what is possible. It can expand the agency of the citizen in relation to city spaces, and in general.”
“I also think that if you understand space as entirely socially produced, it can be argued that any kind of activity produces and creates space. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a slow process in which the art contributes and actively participates. Public art or art that happens in public spaces, definitely produces the city and participates in the city.”
“I believe art can be powerful; I think also if you do something long term, say for 15 years, eventually it creates new patterns for people to use the city or be in the city. It is a process that over time inevitably does something – you can consider the impact of art and social practices.”
As ANTI Festival gets set for their next programme, they’re simultaneously planning their second Future DiverCities lab. Performance artists will be paired with digital artists in an exploration and exchange of style and skill. Croatian partner Kontejner will host their first Future DiverCities lab exploring former industrial areas of the city and its effects on the surrounding neighbourhood.
The purpose of it all? Social change. Urban engagement. And it starts small, with blinking light devices and ripples through a digital canvas.
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