Caring for a cultural ecology

Are grassroots art spaces the canaries in the coal mine of the wider cultural ecology? Dublin’s independent cultural scene, increasingly under threat, offers a case study.

When I arrived in Belgium from Ireland in September 2019 to start a Masters in Fine Art, it felt as if I had landed in a cultural utopia. I was in awe of the range of small- and medium-scale spaces for art and creativity that existed alongside the bigger institutions. Something that struck me though, compared to back home, was that the artists and students I met didn’t seem to care a huge amount about the venues and events. They seemed so much a part of life here that people just took it all for granted. Then, in November that year, the funding cuts were announced, and artists, cultural workers and students came together in their thousands to protest and to strategise about how to defend the arts. When the sector appeared to be at risk, I saw that people did care.

With a new period of structural subsidies on the horizon Dublin’s independent cultural scene might provide some useful insights.

How can we best understand the processes happening in cultural scenes across Europe, with right wing governments shifting the agendas of cultural policies, and public and non-commercial spaces disappearing fast? Fifty years ago, a group of scientists realised that treating animals and plants as separate phenomena did not help people respond to environmental problems, so they created the field of environmental ecology, and now the same framework is often used with regard to culture. The sociologist Ann Markusen described an ‘arts and cultural ecology’ as the complex interdependencies that shape the demand for and production of arts and cultural offerings. This ecology thus not only encompasses the many networks of arts and cultural creators, producers and participants, but also the supporting casts embedded in diverse communities.

With a new period of structural subsidies on the horizon, and fears that there might be a big shake-up of organisations in the wake of Jan Jambon’s vision for the arts in Flanders, Dublin’s independent cultural scene might provide some useful insights. From the boom years of the Celtic Tiger, through the austerity years following the 2008 crash and into the present when we are again seeing our capital city being swallowed up by private development, artists and organisations have had to invent ways to survive. While the specific political and economic contexts of the two scenes are very different, with bigger budgets distributed more widely across the sector in Flanders than in Ireland, the idea of culture as an ecology rather than an economy can give a more complete understanding of the interactions between different players that enable the arts to thrive.

Grassroots cultural spaces have come increasingly under threat, but they have also become sites of resistance and key connectors in networks of mutual support and solidarity.

The challenges in Dublin highlight the interdependency intrinsic to a cultural ecology, and call attention both to what is at risk when smaller spaces disappear, and the abundance that can be created out of scarcity. Grassroots cultural spaces have come increasingly under threat, but they have also become sites of resistance and key connectors in networks of mutual support and solidarity.

The lay of the land

In 2010, two years after the start of the global economic crash that had sent Ireland reeling, unemployment was still high. A lot of people didn’t have anything else to do, so they started a band, or got into sketch comedy, or spoken word poetry. Dublin was full of unfinished office buildings and vacant old houses, and a lot of young people with a lot of energy. Temporary venues popped up across the city, hosting alternative drag nights, storytelling nights, exhibitions, gigs, discussion events, workshops, parties, and more. Since there was no money anyway, there was a strong DIY spirit, with people just putting on the events they wanted to go to. There was a feeling in the air that all kinds of things were possible.

With rents rising exponentially and with little protection from the city, cultural spaces are now disappearing at a frightening pace.

It wasn’t to last though. Around 2014, the economy had ‘improved.’ The Irish state had chosen to alleviate the debt of the banks and property developers rather than that of its citizens, and we had accepted the austerity as if we actually deserved it. The developers started building again, and the financialization of the city resumed. This meant that buildings and plots of land were turned into financial assets for investors. Swathes of previously publicly owned land in the city centre had already been privatized and turned into offices and gentrifying rental properties. As flocks of cranes returned to the skyline, it became clear that the new Dublin growing up around us was not a Dublin for all of us.

While all this was going on, people were still coming together to create and animate the spaces for culture that they wanted to see in the city, as many had started to do even before the crash. Operating largely without funding or institutional support, they were motivated by a shrinking number of interesting and affordable places to socialise. This led to the creation of some of the most essential spaces for the arts scene in the last few years. Yet with rents rising exponentially and with little protection from the city, cultural spaces are now disappearing at a frightening pace. As it becomes increasingly difficult to both work in the arts and afford to live in the city, many artists and creatives are leaving Dublin. The paradox is that the vulnerable position of these spaces, and the other precarities that get in the way of making things happen, is also what has driven people to develop resilient strategies of collectivity, and create communities that can make it all feel worthwhile.

An ecological approach

Different spaces feed the ecosystem in different ways. The problem in Dublin is not the number of spaces disappearing, rather it is the kind of spaces that are disappearing. The diversity of the ecosystem is under threat. Most of the places that have disappeared and not been replaced are smaller scale artist-run gig and exhibition spaces, including spaces that were open for anyone to put on events for cheap or free, such as Jigsaw or Exchange. These were grassroots spaces, collectively organised for the most part, that were open for anyone to participate or create events. In cultural critic John Holden’s terminology, these spaces were both platforms and connectors.

A city needs more than just small rooms for artists to work in, and bigger rooms for gigs to happen in.

Holden described four essential roles in cultural ecologies: Guardians, Connectors, Platforms and Nomads. Guardians look after tangible and intangible cultural assets. Examples include museums, libraries, archives, heritage bodies, as well as academics and some galleries and performing arts companies. Connectors, as the name suggests, put people and resources together, and move energy around the ecology. Examples might include cultural producers, curators, certain organisations and venues, some arts administrators, and bloggers. Platforms are places where work can be presented, namely venues, galleries, community halls, pubs, clubs, streets and websites. These three roles can all exist because of the fourth role, that of the Nomad. This describes most of the population, who range freely across the cultural world, visiting venues, watching films and TV shows, borrowing library books and so on. Individual artists can also be nomads, showing or performing work in different places at different times.

As the number and variety of smaller platforms in Dublin has decreased, we have also lost connectors. A city needs more than just small rooms for artists to work in, and bigger rooms for gigs to happen in. It needs spaces where people can come together to work in, have conversations, and experience the work of others, like A4 Sounds, an artist-run workspace and gallery that prioritises lower income artists, and JaJa Studios, a DIY gig and practice space; it needs open places where people can come together to collaborate and try out their ideas, like Outlandish Theatre Platform’s Open Theatre Practice, and Kirkos Ensemble’s Unit 44; and it needs places where people can come together to socialise and let off steam, like the Dublin Digital Radio (ddr) parties.

With fewer spaces, the cultural ecology is evolving into one in which the links are becoming weaker and the interdependencies not being nurtured.

It needs places where relationships can form, ideas can be exchanged, and locally produced art and culture enjoyed communally. These are the things that sustain and inspire us as artists and as people, against a backdrop of rising rents, insecure working conditions, and the threat of eviction. With fewer spaces where artists and other creatives can be part of a community and programme their own events, the cultural ecology is evolving into one in which the links are becoming weaker and the interdependencies not being nurtured, leading to fragmentation, less opportunities to develop audiences at a grassroots level, and low morale among artists.

The highest tier of the funded, ‘professional’ arts world benefits hugely from the existence of local arts spaces too. People get exposed to what art can be at performance nights and parties at DIY spaces, and might decide to start their own radio show with a friend on a local digital station like ddr. That might lead to organising a gig in a space like Unit 44, which could develop into a funded project, with paid collaborators who they know from the DIY space. Ideas and people flow from these spaces out to other ones. Without protecting and fostering accessible spaces of possibility, where the barrier to engaging with the arts is low, as audience or participant or co-creator, a few years down the road you won’t have the same number or range of experienced artists reaching the biggest stages.

Access point to the arts

The strength of the cultural scene in Flanders and Brussels is the diversity of venues that exist, from local arts and maker spaces like De Meubelfabriek, Manoeuvre and Samenschool, to somewhat bigger organisations like Bij’ de Vieze Gasten and Toestand, to the larger and more widely visible venues like the Vooruit and Beursschouwburg, which are also not so big as to be sealed off from the world. There is interplay between spaces of different sizes, and funding is spread across the spectrum. If this changes significantly, with funding distributed more centrally, it will not only mean the disappearance of some smaller spaces but a deterioration in the health of the whole ecosystem. Rather than just looking after number one, bigger players in the cultural sector will need to come together to support local players, but importantly by advocating for their continued financial autonomy, which will help them to maintain their own independent programmes and not be subsumed by the agendas of bigger institutions.

When caring for a cultural ecology you build relationships in a way that differs from the fully funded or commercial sectors.

In some ways the local spaces are the most essential part of a healthy cultural ecology: for many they are the access point to the arts, where a cross section of society comes together and actually interacts and participates. If they are open rather than serving as exclusive cliques, these are spaces where people’s experiences of art and culture can shift for the better.

It takes a village

Running these spaces means making decisions, such as how to maintain and run the space, how to cover the rent, or when to open it and for whom. Navigating these decisions and finding what works is a process of trial and error that produces shared knowledge of ways to do things collectively. These practices can then be drawn on by others who come into contact with the space, and be organically shared further. Then there is the rallying of troops, the necessary sharing of space and resources, the asking people for favours and lifts and lends of equipment.

All of this builds relationships in a way that organising things within the fully funded or commercial sectors does not. Members need to chip in, or people need to volunteer their time or skills. Collectivity is being practised constantly, not just preached. A4 Sounds and ddr pay their rent through membership fees, effectively collectivising their costs, which also helps to build community and a sense of interdependency. Recently ddr has formalised these practices and become a co-operative. A4 also offers community memberships for those who need the community more than the workspace, and collective memberships for activist groups.

All of this not only makes an exciting cultural life possible, but also bleeds into other spaces and projects in the city, acting as a counter to the individualist mindset that has become so dominant and can make it feel so hard to make creative things happen. I don’t want to romanticise the situation. Individual and collective burnout through unpaid or underpaid labour and overwork is the biggest issue these projects face. Specific funding should be allocated to these spaces, if they want it, to mitigate against this.

In a city where urban planning is increasingly dominated by a neoliberal strategy of development, community building becomes even more crucial as a way to counter growing alienation.

Nonetheless, I think it is important to recognise that, as was posited by the militant urban research project The Provisional University, when people have to sustain themselves and their social and cultural projects outside of commercial interests and state funding, different social relations develop, based on interdependence, trust and care. Projects like Cooking for Freedom, a migrant woman-led initiative facilitating asylum seekers living in non-self-catering accommodation to cook nutritious meals for their families, were able to get started in spaces like Jigsaw, from where they built up relationships with other community spaces to get access to other kitchens and grow their work.

In a city where urban planning is increasingly dominated by a specifically neoliberal strategy of development, this kind of community building becomes even more crucial as a way to counter growing alienation. As rents are rising and wages remain stagnant, people have to work longer hours in more jobs. They have less time to spend with family and friends, and fewer non-commercial or public places to meet. And yet, when togetherness is being eroded, it also becomes more essential. There is a quote from Judith Butler that I find myself returning to time and again. She writes:

What does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? Such an impasse can become the paradoxical condition of a form of social solidarity both mournful and joyful, a gathering enacted by bodies under duress or in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance.

Jigsaw, ddr, Outlandish Theatre Platform, JaJa and A4 were and are spaces of resistance that provide the conditions for people to act, creatively and politically. There were the anti-eviction trainings, the banner painting, the meetings of grassroots political groups. But so many of the other gigs, dinners, workshops, festivals and parties in those spaces signify resistance and persistence too. Resistance to elitism and exclusion in the arts, to capitalism and consumerism, to racism and sexism and homophobia, and to the idea of individual self-sufficiency as normal or even possible.

As I write this today, people are gathering in the centre of Dublin to protest the planned development of the site of the Cobblestone, a pub and venue that has long been the centre of the traditional Irish music scene in the city, into a nine-storey hotel. Dublin is not going down without a fight, and it is a fight that we have unconsciously been preparing for for years, in small sweaty rooms full of joy.

Dublin is not going down without a fight.

Funding cuts will come, but they are not the most important thing to oppose. They do not erase the relationships that exist between different players in the cultural scene. They can, however, precipitate a change in those relationships. What kind of change that is depends on the attitudes individuals and organisations within the ecology take. If the sector as a whole is to continue to thrive, the response cannot be competition, but solidarity. We must continue to create the spaces that don’t exist, redistribute resources and funding where we can, and protect the spaces under threat. The important things to fight for are the relationships, the interdependencies, and the mutual support. A caring that goes beyond care between individuals, to a caring between groups, spaces, organisations, scenes and sectors.

The word resilience, when applied to individuals, often takes focus away from the oppressive power dynamics that have made resilience necessary. In ecological terms though, resilience is less about individual organisms, and more about the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly. If this new round of structural funding turns the cultural sector of Flanders upside down, players across the sector need to come together to make sure that next time, that will not even be possible.