Projecting Artistic Practice-II: Necessary Emergencies
Five conditions for sustaining a self-organised space
A few weeks ago I was updating my CV (that administrative gesture that always gets postponed) and I realised there was something important I had never included: having co-founded and directed a self-organised space. And yet it is one of the most structural experiences of my practice, since it was there that I began curating my first exhibitions.
Housed in my apartment in Cuenca, it was called “Oficina” and was active between 2016 and 2017. It was a project that emerged from the need to create a place for encounter and creative exchange in a small city unable to channel the activity of the artists living there. It hosted group exhibitions, concerts, residencies and participatory activities.
I wonder why self-organised spaces never quite fit into the narratives that shape a career: they are not entirely institutional, not entirely professional, nor entirely measurable. They are traversed by forms of precarity, affection and unpaid labour that does not always translate into symbolic capital. We need to change the narrative around self-organised spaces.
Thinking about this, and with the distance of time, I have tried to identify what conditions make it possible to sustain these spaces. This is not a manual, but rather a kind of minimal structure:
1. A space (and the capacity to sustain it)
It seems obvious, but it is not. It connects us to questions of class, politics and economics. Having a place means being able to pay for it, negotiate it or maintain it under often unstable conditions. Without that material base, everything else is provisional.
2. A radical insistence
I nitial enthusiasm is easy, but insistence costs. Radical insistence is the capacity to continue when there is no clear return, when the project does not respond to logics of productivity or recognition. If the space is the ground, insistence is the root.
3. An active community
Let us never confuse audience with community. A community is an active network that uses the space, activates it and ultimately needs it to unfold ideas, bonds and affections within it. A self-organised space cannot afford to programme for a community, but from within it.
4. Time (and managing exhaustion)
Time is the least visible resource, but undoubtedly the most determining one. How do we find sustainable rhythms outside productive logics? Let us measure our strength. Many spaces do not end due to a lack of ideas, but from exhaustion.
5. A minimal structure
Even the most informal spaces need forms of organisation, porous but present. Without some structure and allies to help sustain it, the insistence that holds the project together becomes fragile too quickly.
Perhaps the question is not only how to sustain self-organised spaces, but above all, and returning to the question of narrative: how to make them count within the stories that shape our trajectories, and our lives.