Beyond the hype

Abstract

The paper explores art and the city beyond the ‘hype’ of large cultural investment, urban creative titles and cultural place branding programmes. It emphasises the importance of exploring the neglected perspective of the role that everyday culture can play in cities, especially in moments of crisis. It investigates Athens and the economic crisis that affected urban life in the last decade to consider the impact this has had on everyday cultural practices, arts institutions and the experience of the city. Drawing on de Certeau’s concept of everyday practice and using the case study of Athens Fringe Festival, we highlight how ordinary artistic practice and everyday creativity in the city can shape new patterns of cultural participation, urban dialogue and, possibly, cultural citizenship, in a moment of crisis. The paper concludes by arguing for the need to re-orient academic scholarship and future research agendas on art and the city towards everyday creative practice, moving beyond conventional city marketing and institutional, cultural regeneration discourses and strategies.

Keywords:

• cultural hype
• creative cities
• cultural democracy
• Athens
• urban crisis
• everyday creativity
• de Certeau

Introduction

Everydayness and everyday culture in cities lie at the heart of De Certeau’s (1984) action theory that can be found in his celebrated work ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’. He sees ordinary practices—gestures, routines, errands, strolls in the city—and ‘arts of doing’ as a potential source of diversion and an inventive form of counter-power able to resist dominant spatial ideologies and urban patterns. Anonymous everyday practice in the city, he argues, in contrast to spectacular and institutional practice, can create and actualise urban space, transform spatial elements and discreetly intervene in the topology, geography and life in the city.

According to this perspective, the city is shaped and defined by both cultural topo-strategies and topo-tactics. Topo-strategies relate to formally established institutional bodies, formal organisations and legitimate science and aesthetic regimes that produce cultural meaning in a place through the power they hold. This is manifested in governmental urban policies, state-initiated and funded programmes in the city, institutional mega-events that shape urban relations and cultural dynamics. Topo-tactics, on the other hand, are everyday practices invented, developed and applied by ordinary citizens.

This, of course, has implications in the cultural sphere too. Art and culture that is not the remit of professional artists, cultural institutions and arts organisations can be seen as creative everyday topo-tactics. They belong to those unknown ordinary creative social actors that make a city what it is, through their creative moves and aesthetic interventions, in the city. In this view, topo-tactics can be considered those urban cultural practices that play with the official urban cultural system, engage with or against institutional directions and misappropriate urban elements. They are not planned, deliberate or rebellious cultural attempts but repetitive, unconscious and discreet ordinary urban inventions and interventions. They are a form of defensive expression and creative engagement in and with the city that adds room for manoeuvre within dominant official urban structures.

Using the theoretical lens of de Certeau, this paper reviews extant urban theory and literature on the role that art and culture play in urban development, highlighting the way academic researchers—not dissimilarly to investors or neoliberal policymakers—have fallen into the habit of focusing on how culture functions in the city only in specific times of economic, branding or investment hype, often forgetting the everyday nature and workings of urban culture. We acknowledge that there has been increased pressure to research and evaluate the ‘impact’ of culture after considerable investments or large-scale initiatives, such as the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) and similar. However, in this paper, we argue that such events and titles remain accessible only to a limited number of selected. These, often, formal, temporary and extraordinary events have distorted our understanding and appreciation of the subtle and discreet role that everyday art and mundane self-expressive creative practice can play in contemporary cities.

We suggest that the research agenda needs to be reset moving the discourse beyond the hype surrounding this type of extraordinary urban interventions and stretching instead in two main directions: (a) the value of everyday culture in cities; and (b) its activation in moments of crisis. We start with a critical review of the literature that specifically addresses these two concerns: on one side, we need to explore the workings and development of art and culture in the context of ordinary urban life, including their everyday contested manifestation. On the other, we investigate the value and ways of workings of art and culture in contexts of crisis—economic, humanitarian, political, environmental. We, then, introduce the case study of Athens, the capital city of Greece, providing an overview of the way the cultural sphere has developed in the last ten years as a response to the economic crisis that broke out in 2008. Within this urban context, we introduce methods and data collection processes during a longitudinal ethnographic project on the Athens Fringe Festival (AFF), a grassroots multi-arts festival that functions as an extended case study for our research. Through our fieldwork, we explore the ways the institutional but mainly non-institutional everyday art has responded to the economic crisis and how the city has reshaped the artistic landscape at a time of great difficulty and instability. This allows us to examine the relationship between art and the city beyond ambitious urban development schemes, city gentrification programmes and institutional cultural strategies.

Based on our findings, we argue that citizen-led everyday cultural practices can work as informal and spontaneous creative topo-tactics—à la de Certeau—that challenge and redefine dominant institutional creative topo-strategies applied in the city, especially in times of crisis and upheaval. But we also suggest that tactics are themselves subject to instrumentalization and negotiation, which is a topic that is undertheorized by de Certeau and urban theorists inspired by his work. We, thus, underscore the importance of refocusing the research agenda on art and the city as well as urban policy and development beyond the hype, moving our explorations from institutional cultural strategies and interventions to community-initiated ordinary creative urban manifestations. Such scholarly endeavours could provide valuable insights for academic, managerial and policy pursuits.

Art and the city beyond the hype: failure, everyday creativity and crisis

Many articles have previously reviewed the extensive literature on the role of art and culture in the city in the context of large investment and regeneration projects (Miles and Paddison 2005); major festivals and large urban events (Gotham 2005); creative titles (Boland, Murtagh, and Shirlow 2019) and creative placemaking initiatives and place branding projects (Bıçakçı 2012). This literature reflects de Certeau’s urban conceptualisations of topo-strategies, which describe official cultural projects strategically created and adopted by well-established cultural institutions, governmental bodies and formal institutions aiming to exercise their power to legitimise particular aesthetic regimes and promote dominant meanings and practices of art. We argue that this type of research tends to focus on often limited and concentrated—in time and space—opportunities for art to operate in the city, in a condition, which we summarise using the term ‘hype’ to highlight the often short-term, ambitious and overpowering nature of these interventions (Waitt 2008). The lack of longitudinal studies in this field also testifies the pressure to demonstrate the ad-hoc ‘value’ after specific interventions. This, as argued by Speake and Pentaraki (2017), has also led to an unnecessary narrowing down of the research focus towards the dominance of the neoliberal logic that prioritises grand-scale strategically implemented programmes. Echoing Long (2013, 54), the attention spent towards the impact of neoliberal urban policies has possibly taken away focus from the ‘collective human reactions to the past decade of neoliberalism’. In response to the need to refocus the academic discourse and research beyond this urban cultural hype tendency, we explore the literature on three interconnected areas. Firstly, we review the scarce research that explores the potential negative impact of this cultural hype and examples of failure in official cultural interventions and institutional artistic projects. This area of scholarship highlights the risk behind strategic cultural urban development—topostrategies (De Certeau 1984)—, which are often perceived as generally positive for communities and cities. Thus, we look at the literature that has tried to capture the negative or short-lived impact of institutional culture-led place initiatives, linking these shortcomings with their, often, instrumental agenda. Secondly, we explore the role of everyday art and ordinary creativity, looking beyond place branding initiatives and titles that turn contemporary metropoles into ‘creative cities’ or ‘cities of culture’. This analysis allows us to discuss ‘DIY’ art interventions, ‘open source’ urbanism and crowd-sourced art initiatives—or, according to de Certau, topotactics—that due to their smaller size, localised and informal nature do not usually make the headlines. Of course, there are some exceptions, particularly the growing literature on cultural / art activism (Mayer 2013). However, in this paper, we place attention towards everyday art and participation in ordinary creative practices (Puype 2004; Gross and Wilson 2020), not necessarily art charged with political objectives (Buser et al. 2013). Thirdly, we look at the limited literature that considers the role of art in connection with moments of crisis and disruption in cities.

Beyond urban hype and neoliberal culture-led place branding

Most of the literature exploring the role of art interventions in cities tends to present accounts of either positive urban transformations and regeneration (Miles and Paddison 2005) or resistance to neoliberal place branding (Hollands 2019). However, there is also a less-discussed strand of the literature highlighting negative impacts and projects failures within urban cultural interventions. We categorise these analyses under three perspectives, which have not received much attention: (a) side-effects and disconnections; (b) neoliberal urban risks factors; and (c) failure to achieve/perform. Papers reporting on the impact of events like the ECoC, UK CoC or extensive capital regeneration processes often disagree about their overall positive effects. The positive impacts are reported within areas of general branding, city marketing and image development (Bıçakçı 2012). In their evaluation of Derry-LondonDerry, the first UK CocC, Boland, Murtagh, and Shirlow (2019) show that while some positive effects were observed in community relations and intercultural dialogue, there were ‘excessive expectations’, specifically concerning returns on investment and employment. Doak (2014) also questions the narrow geography of change brought by the UK CoC title that left many communities and neighbourhoods behind. This disconnect is found not only amongst local communities but also between large capital investment and local artists and cultural producers (Comunian and Mould 2014). The longitudinal versus short-term impact is also very problematic. In the case of Cork (ECoC 2005) a large number of significant high-profile cultural institutions closed down after the expiration of the cultural programme due to economic difficulties (O’Callaghan 2012).

In the same context of cultural hype and urban development, we find evidence of arts organisations and institutions becoming, or being pushed towards becoming, players—and victims—of the neoliberal market dynamics of urban transformation. Ashley (2014) looks at Seattle and reflects on the popular urban strategies that forced arts institutions to engage in bricks and mortar projects with the aspiration to contribute to the physical rehabilitation of urban areas. The study highlights that while this was a typical, often unquestioned, practice in the pre-2008 expansion period in the UK and USA, the same framework might not hold anymore in a post-2008 world. As the economic crisis increased uncertainty and risk, many cities experienced a halt for cultural development.

Finally, these market-driven urban dynamics connect with another unspoken impact of the globalised trends: these interventions tend to result in homologation. They shape our understanding of what art is and how it functions in the city, forcing the public to appreciate culture only in the specific format of ‘big shiny buildings’ (Comunian and Mould 2014, 70). Embracing this critique, we acknowledge that many cultural initiatives often benefit the governmental, market and elitist stakeholders but not the people living in these cities (Doak 2014).

Everyday art and ordinary creative practice in the city

In contrast to the strong emphasis of urban cultural policy and scholarship on the success (or failures) of creative topostrategies, including large cultural investments and regeneration projects, we find—despite recent calls (Miles and Gibson 2016)—much less literature exploring the role of everyday art and ordinary cultural practice taking place in mundane city settings.

As Gilmore (2013, 94) argues, ‘practices and values associated with every day, quiet and vernacular participation are obscured by official knowledge which privileges legitimate forms and institutions and neglects the local contexts of participation’. Connecting with her investigation that rejects the categorisation of particular places as ‘cultural deserts’, we propose that researching everyday cultural practices of creative citizens, who are not professional artists positioned within the context of elite cultural institutions in the city, should be higher on the agenda for cultural scholars and planners. Taking our argument further, it also becomes essential to consider how best ordinary cultural practices of art engagement and participation can develop across cities organically. Therefore, it is crucial to include reflection on DIY (Do-It-Yourself) urbanism (Finn 2014) or tactical urbanism (Courage 2013). Here, we connect art and the city to a different engagement model that can support grassroots and bottom-up forms of participation, often promoting open-source urbanism (Bradley 2015). While this can lead to connections with forms of cultural activism and protest (Buser et al. 2013), in this paper, we want to focus on the everyday cultural element as distinct (although interconnected) from the political one. Following de Certeau, we define as creative topotactics those unplanned, deliberate and ordinary artistic self-expressive acts in the city. As Gross and Wilson (2020) suggest, it is essential to move beyond the deficit model of arts participation and aim to achieve cultural democracy aspirations through the encouragement of participation in everyday artistic practices in the city.

Art and the city in crisis

When researching the relationship between art and crisis in urban or national contexts, the most substantial part of the literature looks at the impact of the economic crisis on the arts as a sector (Levine 2018). The literature considering the role of art in moments of crisis is very scarce. However, there are recurrent themes concerning the role that art can play in periods of financial, socio-cultural or political decline (Lerer and McGarrigle 2018). For example, the art historian Bishop (2012) supports that in periods of upheaval, different forms of art participation and involvement increases significantly. Leventis (2013) discusses the use of street art (graffiti) in Athens during the economic crisis, while Chatzidakis (2018) reflects on the presence of posters and other visual communications of solidarity during the crisis as forms of cultural activism. However, here we argue that the participation of everyday (non-professional) artists and creative citizens working within their communities and neighbourhoods does not only act as protest and revolt against existing urban patterns (Buser et al. 2013). It can also discreetly intervene in the formation and experience of the city, shaping the broader cultural practices and institutional dynamics of the city, especially during times of crisis. This theoretical take guides our empirical research in modern Athens.

An urban drama unfolds: Athens, recession and grassroots creativity

Athens, the capital city of Greece, has been historically considered a cathedral of the arts, where concepts such as drama, theatre and poetry were born. However, at the dawn of the third millennium, Athens has become broadly known for one of the deepest, if not the most profound, crises that any modern European metropolis has ever experienced (Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2013). Since 2008, Greece has been facing an economic crisis of alarming proportions, mainly due to a substantial state financial deficit worsened by the European and global economic recession (Papaconstantinou 2017). When the crisis first broke out, the structural financial instability led to fears of either a possible bankruptcy of the country’s economy (Thomakos, Monokroussos, and Nikolopoulos 2016). Two years later, in 2010, Greece, unable to cover its financial liabilities, entered into the first bailout agreement with the European Troika, a decision group formed by the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The purpose of this anti-crisis mechanism put in place was to reinstate the competitiveness of the Greek economy by offering to the Greek state a high-interest loan accompanied by strict financial and social adjustment measures (Rasmus 2016). The impact of these measures reshaped the economy, social and cultural life in the capital city and beyond (Mantanika and Kouki 2011). The resulting austerity became synonymous to economic insecurity and impoverishment (Dalakoglou 2012; Mavroudeas and Paitaridis 2014) for many in Greece and Athens (Kaika 2012).

It comes as no surprise that the sovereign debt crisis also dramatically affected the Greek cultural economy and questioned the relationship between the arts and the city (Souliotis 2013). The harsh economic conditions in Greece transformed both the urban public space (Leontidou 2012) and the metropolitan arts landscape. On the one hand, property value decreased. The declining economic and investment interest in the city in conjunction with a range of pre-existing urban challenges impoverished numerous public spaces, such as streets and squares, pubic offices and buildings, but also led to many privately-owned spaces of public use, such as cafes, restaurants, theatres and commercial venues shutting down (Dalakoglou 2012; Serraos and Greve 2015). On the other hand, the collapse of the state and EU support mechanisms brought increasing governmental cuts to the arts sector (Tsiara 2015). The private capital invested in culture, with the exceptions of the dynasty-driven Onassis Cultural Centre and Niarchos Cultural Centre, disappeared. Many cultural organisations and museums limited their activity, let personnel go and reduced their operating hours. Simultaneously, several art institutions, galleries, media channels and theatres decided to close down, including the Theatre Museum and the National Book Centre (EKEBI). Furthermore, state or state-supported cultural institutions, including the National Theatre, the National Opera House and the Athens Concert Hall faced significant financial and operational challenges. Various major festivals were terminated (Lazaretou 2014; Tziovas 2017). Looking at officially published reports (Avdikos, Michailidou, and Klimis 2017), we observe that during the first period of the crisis, between 2008–14, the total recorded number of cultural enterprises decreased approximately by 28% (against a 36,5% increase across the EU).

Despite this general institutional decline, what followed was a contradictory upward tendency of the creative cultural activities in the city that captured the attention of academics and the international and national media (Lowen 2012). In 2011 Athenians generated a huge wave of reaction, including public demonstrations, protests and power struggles (Aslanidis 2016; Pettas 2019), defined as the ‘Movement of the Squares’ in the Greek academic literature (Leontidou 2012; Kallianos 2013). During these events, citizens’ expressions of anger were manifested, and public spaces were burned, vandalised and looted. At the same time, a new experimental approach to protest art emerged. Artists participating in the demonstrations started organising theatrical performances and artistic events alongside the public protests in the city (Brekke, Filippidis, and Vradis 2018).

Interestingly, most of these initiatives were organised by small groups of local people working independently in different parts of the city centre (Lowen 2012). Autonomous teams found the opportunity to create unofficial support networks and take over many private, state or public spaces turning them into meeting places for the local residents, activists and artists (Leontidou 2020). In a short time, several creative multi-use hubs, often called polichoroi in Greek, emerged, some of which evolved into self-managed health clinics, collective kitchens and neighbourhood assemblies in a spirit of informal urban solidarity (Chatzidakis 2018). Low rents, unemployment, the decrease of commercial pressure and an urgent need for self-expression and collectivism contributed to a new creative urban identity for the city (Leontidou 2020). From the New York Times (Donadio 2011) to the BBC (Lowen 2012; Sooke 2017), international media portrayed Athens as the world’s ‘new Berlin’, on account of its emerging crowd-sourced dynamic art scene.

The lack of governmental financial support, the absence of private investment that used to favour large-scale cultural projects, and the inadequate cultural infrastructure motivated the formation of a range of bottom-up creative collectives. These strived to realise self-initiated and self-managed arts projects in unexpected locations with minimum resources (Tsiara 2015). The urban environment was aesthetically ‘attacked’ by non-professional creatives, who staged live art events in the streets and organised cultural interventions outside the formal institutional cultural framework (Tsiara 2015). However, some large-scale cultural projects and gentrification initiatives continued in the city (Alexandri 2018). In particular, two international initiatives took place: Documenta 14 (2017) and the European Capital of Innovation (2018). While aiming to reveal, highlight and critique some of the city's problems linked to the crisis, they ended up instrumentalising and institutionalising some of its sufferings with limited success. Some highlight the difficulty of Documenta—despite the best intentions to engage with the city socio-economic issues—to break free from the ‘accumulation of power that circulating in biennial circuits creates’ (Tsampalla 2020, 275). The greek and international media also captured locals’ angry feelings due to ‘the colonial attitude of the German art extravaganza’ and ‘Crapumenta 14’ graffitis appeared on the city walls (Smith 2017). There is evidence that the spectacular buzz-generating events held in Athens during the crisis years felt restraining and didactic for a large part of the Greek audience (Bradley 2017). This further emphasises the distance created between everyday artistic expressions of the city and official creative interventions that promote institutionally produced culture.

An ethnographic exploration: the case of Athens Fringe Festival

The unprecedented organic artistic activity witnessed in Athens during the second phase of the recent economic upheaval captured our attention. It motivated us to explore the arts scene in the city for more than eight years now. In our effort to better understand the proliferation of the aforementioned bottom-up art tendency, we broadly engaged with a range of constituencies in Athens, including policymakers, artists, audiences, cultural intermediaries and representatives from major cultural institutions, festival producers, art critics, journalists and media delegates, private corporate sponsors and individual art supporters. In this paper, we use the Athens Fringe Festival (AFF), an annual grassroots arts festival launched in 2008, as an extended case study (Burawoy 1998), to discuss the role and function of everyday art events and cultural practices in cities going through moments of crisis and unrest.

AFF is selected as our extended ethnographic case study because it was one of the first major art festivals in Athens to promote everyday art and ordinary creativity as a way for locals to reimagine, recreate and reclaim their city. Ordinary citizens, who were not necessarily professional art workers, had no artistic background or technical art education were empowered to express themselves in the urban environment, collaborate and creatively intervene in the public realm. Also, AFF is not a governmental initiative, a state or privately funded organisation or a politically charged cultural manifestation but an informal effort from below of the local community to create the conditions in which diverse groups of people living in Athens could participate in the local cultural production. Inspired by and informally affiliated with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival but not officially linked to it, AFF operates as a non-profit organisation and grounds its work on the principle of aesthetic dialogue and arts-stimulated communicative action in the context of the city (Kester 2004). The festival aims to operate as an artistic urban platform that triggers the active interaction between the city, its citizens and its visitors. Its participatory nature, informal profile and dialogical character corroborate historical accounts suggesting that periods of economic, social and political turbulences elicit an explosion of engagement with artistic and creative practices (Bishop 2012). Another significant reason for selecting AFF as our case for this study concerns its emergence, which runs in parallel with the emergence of the crisis, its increasing popularity and expansion during the crisis years and its relatively recent decline.

AFF takes place every June/July in the centre of Athens, during which a plethora of artistic events take place simultaneously across the city in numerous outdoor spaces (including streets, gardens, squares, parks and neighbourhoods) but also in a variety of indoor spaces (such as public transport vehicles, cafes, restaurants, cinemas, theatres, factories and residencies). In line with its philosophy, the festival hosts every possible form, method and practice of art. All events/exhibitions are free for festival participants sharing their work with the public, and many events are also free for the general public. From our empirical investigations, we observed that people involved in AFF come from a range of different ethnic, religious and educational backgrounds; have limited or no professional experience in the arts sector and represent different genders, age groups, professional circles, political interests and socio-economic classes.

During our fieldwork, we engaged in a multi-sited ethnography using a range of techniques including participation, observation, study of media outputs and reports, filming and interviewing from 2011 to 2017, aiming to investigate how art functions in a city over an extended time of crisis (Falzon 2016). In the first phase of the study, we were intensely involved in the preparation and implementation of the festival and actively participated in a range of performances and events. This includes dancing and acting on the streets of Athens, jotting field notes informally talking to co-participants and audiences. This enabled us to experience the festival directly, becoming familiar with local norms, processes and discourses and also establish significant relationships. In the next phase, additional data were generated by observing and keeping notes of the physical activity of festival participants and their interactions with the urban environment. In the last phase of the investigation, we conducted ten interviews with organisers, artists, first-time festival attendees, returning goers and volunteers covering the development of AFF since its start. The open-ended extended interviews (anonymised with fictional names) allowed participants to verbally articulate their urban experience before, during and after the emergence of the AFF. In this paper, we do not ground our analysis on the visual material collected, but we complement our interpretations with some photographs.

We use a process-based analytical framework to narrate the changing urban cultural landscape during the austerity period (Giesler and Thompson 2016). The findings reveal systemic cultural changes, institutional evolutions and urban transformations that make us reconsider the role of art in metropolitan areas that are not in a ‘hype’ or ‘boom’.

Emerging cultural dynamics in a city in economic crisis

A cultural hype or a cultural hoax?: the pre-crisis urban cultural experience

The relationship between art and the city in Athens can be articulated in connection with pre and post-crisis rhetoric. It is also important to acknowledge the change that the financial crisis has brought to traditional arts institutions and organisations. Previous literature demonstrates that between 1994–2006, there was an impressive investment in Greek culture, mainly in Athens, coming from EU Structural Funds in the framework of the integration of the country in the European Union (Zorba 2009). However, these large funds were primarily used to construct large-scale cultural infrastructure, the design and development of high-profile cultural centres, the organisation of major art events, the renovation of heritage sites and museums and the promotion of prestigious exhibitions. In many ways, the first ECOC organised in Athens in 1985 had defined the cultural policy agenda in the city, and it later became a central ambition for an elite of cities across Europe able to compete and attract resources for culture. As Martha, a young emerging choreographer and active participant in AFF, who lives and works in Athens states, in the pre-crisis era,

 … there was so much capital invested in cultural infrastructure, programs and events. This money would come from state or European sources. For example, the greatest arts festival of the country is the Greek Festival of Athens. It runs every summer and it is probably the most attended cultural event in the city. It is state-funded.

However, our research participants questioned the kind of culture that was being supported and financed by these large EU and state funds providing insights about how these resources were used as a means to establish creative topostrategies—à la de Certeau—in the city that felt repressive and restrictive. Martha reflects on the Festival of Athens, the official cultural festival of the city, arguing that it is ‘a very exclusive cultural institution’ that imposes barriers for emerging local artists to perform and interact with such status organisations.

People would apply again and again without receiving any information about the reasons for their rejection to perform in the ‘Festival of Athens’, the festival of their city, right? […]. On the other hand, people of the system, you know … friends of friends, or big names and celebrities used to be invited again and again.

During our fieldwork, participants repetitively commented on the level of potential corruption that this major EU investment in public cultural institutions and private arts foundations has caused and the negative effects of the generous grants given to a very small inside circle of professional artists. They also talked about ‘a corrupted cultural system’ that rejects ‘the outsiders’. Citizens and ordinary people in Athens were considered as non-artists, non-creators, non-producers of culture. They were left with limited opportunities to artistically express themselves and cultivate their creativity. This confirms Zorba’s views (2009) about the historical lack of efficiency in the cultural policy-making processes in Greece but also a lack of transparency of cultural committees in the Ministry of Culture and arts programmers in state-funded cultural institutions. Participants also referred to a clientele system that used to be shaped by ‘appointed rather than elected administrators in the cultural entities’ (Zorba 2009, 257). One of the organisers of the AFF, Manos, expresses his frustration explaining that for years he was ‘begging the well-established art festivals […] to become more open, to accept the creative work of more people’. He discusses the concerns of many local artists about their inability to perform in their city and refers to an unequal distribution of public resources.

We have sent countless letters to artistic directors and cultural programmers asking them to allow more people to participate in the Greek artistic scene. Everything was rejected. We were not ‘professional’ enough.

The discourse about whose culture is represented in the city but also the prerogative of state cultural institutions to work with acclaimed international artists was a feature of the traditional political and institutional views in Athens. The dominant ideology was mainly formed by a paternalistic western-focused view of what art is and what culture citizens should be seeing in the city, which was promoting the idea of culture as a display, high art and adornment. Andy, an amateur fine artist, summarises:

[…] it was art centrally produced, nationally or internationally, by a handful of people … we could all predict who would get the money and who would get the chance to showcase their art every year in the city […] No voice from the non-mainstream. A vicious cycle. It was exhausting … 

It is, therefore, interesting to notice that before the crisis, the hype connected with a long-term international city branding ambition, a tourism attraction development strategy and the successful organisation of international events—like the 1985 Athens European City of Culture, the 2004 Cultural Olympiad and Olympic Games—made the relationship between art and the city seem by many as a hoax. Culture was always experienced as an institutionally driven strategic exercise, which did not allow negotiations on whose art and whose city was being presented and represented. Participants talked about an exhausting sociocultural exclusion and inadequate opportunities for cultural access and participation. Manos explains:

In 2008, we sent an open letter to the Greek Festival asking them to create a scene for everyday, emerging, not well-known artists. For one more time, there was no response. They didn’t even acknowledge us as cultural contributors in the city […]. Then, one day, they announced that they will fund very few established artists again because of crisis-related budget cuts.

The suppression of cultural expression experienced in previous decades in Athens was the outcome of many different factors, including neoliberal Eurocentric and ethnocentric cultural policies that were privileging modernisation, westernisation and globalisation ideals. As a result, the concept of culture was restricted to products of the ancient Greek civilisation, international cultural imports, national high-art goods and mass entertainment manifestations (Zorba 2009). Returning to De Certeau’s theorisations, such cultural creative products were mainly the outcome of formal institutional strategies deployed by state bodies, municipalities, official cultural organisations—small or large—that kept defining the city and its cultural life in the pre-crisis period. These creative topostrategies have historically instituted the relations between the cultural actors—producers, distributors and consumers—in the city and established the cultural power structures within the local creative economy. However, the institutional melt-down that was later experienced due to the recession functioned as a motivational trigger to remedy the challenges of limited cultural accessibility and participation of ordinary creative citizens.

From capital of culture to cultural capital: the emergence of AFF

Participating in AFF events and reflecting on the stories from the field, we realised that the crisis acted as a trigger for local cultural producers to question the status quo. It provided a different perspective on the role and value of art, which did not have to include established institutions and large infrastructure but also—because of the crisis—did not have to respond to the need to be attractive to external audiences. Kiki, a co-organiser and active participant in the AFF reflects on this.

This is when we decided that if no one wants to let us participate with our own terms, we would create our own terms for our participation […] The crisis was on our side. We could find some open spaces, we could work together and develop a platform. […] In 2008, AFF was born out of this need for participation in the cultural production of the city.[AFF] is … an action of participation in the cultural commons […] We would create the real Athens Festival.

The organisers and participants of AFF promoted a bottom-up recognition that the cultural capital of citizens—their knowledge, history as well as cultural expressivity and creativity—cannot be taken away like other forms of capital accumulated (Bourdieu 1984). With this, it also came the realisation that in order to express and manifest the culture that each citizen inhabits, there was no need for large investment and infrastructure; everyday places could provide what was needed so that the different creative voices of the city could be heard (see Figure 1). In other words, the economic crisis and austerity acted as a trigger for counter-dominant ordinary creative practices to emerge outside the institutional, cultural framework of the city. This ideal of tactical urbanism (Courage 2013) reflects the need to explore different and novel ways in which citizens can interact with the city but also responds to the need to discuss art and culture beyond the neoliberal hype and its cultural institutionalisation (Speake and Pentaraki 2017).

Figure 1: Dancing in the Streets (with permission of AFF).

We created this platform to enable every creative Athenian to find their artistic voice and take part in the urban debate. [AFF] participants need no personal favors or inside networks to express themselves artistically in their city.

AFF organisers, as Maria explains above, wanted to break any barrier for people in the city to actively participate in the cultural domain. She continues:

[AFF] accepts every single form of cultural expression. There is no curation. […] Anyone who has a creative idea can participate and showcase their work during the festival. All proposals, all projects are accepted and presented. We do not reject, judge or evaluate the artistic ideas here. This is the audience’s role. We just come together to artistically speak to each other and express our emotions, our concerns, fears and dreams.

The festival’s organisers present the emergence of this artistic initiative as the organic, spontaneous and informal outcome that grew out of the community's need for participatory practices that could include more non-mainstream voices. Creatives taking part in the AFF emphasised the new ways in which the festival provided creative DIY opportunities and forms of participatory engagement with their urban spaces and fellow citizens. As Knox (2005, 1) argues, the city's capacity to facilitate a pace of life that is conducive to ‘routine encounters and shared experiences’ can lead to constructions of a sense of place. In a similar vein, AFF tries to trigger this urban dialogue through the art that each Athenian wishes to produce and share with their fellow citizens. This is reflected in the festival’s name or mission declaration, which ironically respond to the exclusive practices of the official Festival of Athens, expressing the need for everyday urban interaction in our ordinary places:

We are seeking reasons to talk to each other, and we are happy when we find one, even if this reason is to yell at each other. We live in the same city. We are the first generation that feels that we own it. We love it. Athens belongs to us and it's the extension of our living rooms. […] Fringe is the Festival of Athens.

In line with de Certeau’s theorisations, creative initiatives, such as AFF, enable ordinary people to find creative ways to challenge and transform dominant urban cultural norms and meanings, resist prevailing narratives and offerings and oppose repressive aspects of our experience of the modern city.

The widening of the cultural participation during the crisis

AFF defines itself as a space of social dialogue where voices from the margins can be expressed and heard. When most economic but also political opportunities for expression (shopping, selling, consuming, making political decisions on a local but also national level) are taken away because of the austerity measures, the city remains a fixed landscape. However, cultural events and creative tactical ways of experiencing and exploring the city like AFF can turn a place into a more open platform for sociocultural dialogue (Souliotis 2013). Using our senses to artistically express ourselves in the city and bodily experience the environment means that we can get familiarised with the place, master a place and take control of it over time. Isadora, a young festival participant, connects the success of the AFF with a period that was lacking other opportunities for cultural self-expression.

[…] we have found a way to take part in the public debate and intervene. We do this through art, the most genuine form of human self-expression […] We use sounds and rhythms, our bodies and our moves, our stories and our poems, to share our experiences, our dreams, our troubles.

AFF is the performing, live version of the messages witnessed in other aesthetic expressive forms, such as the graffiti art found on myriad walls and surfaces in this city (Leventis 2013). In this sense, the urban space is open to accept multiple voices in a range of visual or experiential ways through AFF, which works as a political response in the broader sense, a form of cultural activism engagement and resistance aiming to accommodate multiple narratives and reconnect locals to their city. The festival represents the ongoing struggle of the common people to shift the focus from the mainstream and hegemonic inscriptions of Athens culture—professional celebrated artists, cultural institutions, the state—towards a new cultural democracy (Gross and Wilson 2020) that allows untold stories of the city and its inhabitants to come to the forefront (see Figure 2). In many ways, it represents a ‘space of openness’ as discussed by Sanul and van Heur (2018, 815) that, on one side, contributes to ‘the development of cultural infrastructures of common life’ but also acknowledges that the most open cultural infrastructure is the city itself and the everyday practices of diverse communities, not an allocated building. Alekos, a co-organiser confesses:

At the beginning we thought that it would be around 10 or 20 people interested in taking part. But we soon found out that it was more than 500 ‘artists’ that wanted to show their creative work in just one year. We started looking for more spaces, public, private, shops, streets.

The festival was more successful in allowing artistic self-expression than creating audiences per se. This reflects the importance to reconsider how audiences experience culture and where they might expect to find it (Comunian and Mould 2014). Kiki explains:

Figure 2: Participatory performance in a courtyard in the centre of Athens (with permission of AFF).

The actual audience for each event was smaller. It was a few people attending each show and exhibition. […] However, the festival was a lively manifestation of the public request for urban artistic self-expression.

Taking this into consideration, AFF may have expanded the meaning of culture and the understanding of who makes the urban culture. Most importantly, grassroots cultural initiatives like AFF have probably contributed to the partial shift of the dominant discourse about the right of each citizen to artistically express themselves in the city. As de Certeau would argue, it is the everydayness and the ordinary and mundane cultural practices of its people—the creative topotactics that ordinary citizens invent and deploy—that shape a city and not only the plans of the metropolitan cultural organising bodies. Manos comments on the changing dynamics, cultural practices and representations in Athens after the emergence and development of AFF.

I believe we contributed to the widening of the cultural landscape. In a sense, it was urban policy created by the citizens for the citizens … [AFF] helped to redefine what culture is. […] The right to participate in the aesthetics of your city and the aesthetics of our common lives.

Future scenarios and dangers: the aftermath

The impact of AFF has been significant and has allowed for a change of attitude on the relationship between art and the city. As participants and organisers acknowledged, the recent editions of the AFF have been much smaller, ten years after the crisis broke out. Fewer participants and fewer events took place in the last years. However, this is considered a success.

 … this is exactly what we were hoping for. We never had a financial incentive. We just wanted to open up the space so that the creative voices of this city can find their own way to create the right conditions for staging and presenting their work outside the established cultural institutions of the past. And they did.

Some of the organisers of the festival argued that thanks to the approach of AFF, but also other similar informal cultural initiatives and ordinary creative practices, there are now many self-managed groups of citizens that have dared—with different independent projects—to challenge the Athenian arts institutions and creative topo-strategies imposed from official cultural bodies. Many more small community organisations are now using open public spaces or abandoned places, turning them into lively creative ‘spaces of openness’ for artistic activity and dialogue (Sanul and van Heur 2018; Leontidou 2020). Dimitris, one of the AFF volunteers, points out how people now ‘use the streets, their houses, their living rooms, cafés, shops, vehicles of public transportation to express themselves and communicate with fellows. That was the whole point. Now there are alternative ways to serve the need for cultural participation’. However, this manifested change concerns also the cultural institutions and art establishment. Manos shares his thoughts on the institutional shift.

There are so many festivals for new artists and local cultural producers now. The main cultural institutions of the country have followed our lead […] The irony is that this organic artistic activity is so intense today that all the festivals that were once rejecting us, now they ask us to participate in their programs. […] Last year, the Athenian Concert Hall, which has claimed bankruptcy, invited us to “tell them how we do it”.

It is interesting to note here that even well-established cultural institutions are looking at the potential to launch participatory programmes for their audience—everyday creative citizens—and learn lessons from informal grassroots initiatives that invite the everyday culture produced by non-professionals. The AFF organisers admitted being asked to share lessons on how large art centres could involve people in formal venues to become financially sustainable during this challenging time of recession. As Manos reported, traditional venues are now involving more audiences in their cultural programmes. This makes them look more open and democratic. Cultural participation becomes a brand itself for official cultural institutions in the city but also the city itself. ‘They need some good publicity […] they are looking for a system, a method, of participation’. However, our research participants expressed also the fear of how this organic participatory tendency manifested now in Athens might end up being instrumentalised; cultural participation, everyday creativity and grassroots engagement cannot be modelled and engineered, they argue. ‘Participation is something very organic, ongoing and spontaneous. It emerges from obstacles, repression and a strong desire to be active and change things […] not from standardised processes’. This helps us realise how creative topo-tactics that emerge from everydayness can be potentially co-opted and subsumed by the art establishment and neoliberal place-making endeavours. The risk is that although many cultural institutions have now become more open to inviting emerging artists to present their creative output in ‘alternative scenes’, this institutionalised type of participation can become reductionist, creating no long-term legacy for a genuine democratic, participatory cultural practice but, instead, leading to a neo-consumption process of cultural pseudo-participation. DIY grassroots interventions and crowd-sourced creative projects can become another ‘model’ to be followed to capitalise on and commodify citizen participation. Our findings resonate with Long’s (2013) warning that social and cultural activism can be subject to commodification by neoliberal forces. In other words, counter-hegemonic voices can become part of an urban brand and gentrification strategy (Long 2013) and the everyday artistic self-expressive practices in the city—the creative topotactics—of the citizens can fuel the strategic urban planning and policy—the creative topostrategies—in a place. As Ellie noted:

No urban or national policy of cultural participation has been ever produced in Greece. And, unfortunately, autonomous resisting art voices that used to independently create in the urban environment, are now getting integrated in the usual institutional cultural monster, which now looks more inclusive and welcoming, more participatory.

Despite these risks, the findings of our research show that the crisis allowed the Athenian cultural field to move beyond the pre-crisis dominant structures. It helped the city abandon the cultural excellence rationale that for years ignored manifestations of popular culture, everyday self-expression, community art and minority creativity in Athens (Ebrey 2016). Zorba (2009) acknowledges that before the emergence of the crisis, there was not enough space for everyday creativity and ordinary artistic self-expression to develop in Greece. However, we argue that the recent challenging socio-economic time brought, in a sense, some kind of hope for a potential re-distribution of cultural capital in the city; times of decline and unrest, not necessarily, times of hype, can motivate and enable diverse cultural participants to exercise their cultural rights in the city.

Conclusions

This paper has tried to move the research and policy agenda around the role of art in the city beyond existing discourses that privilege institutional culture-led regeneration, official placemaking strategies, cultural titles and urban competition for large capital infrastructure. The post-crisis attention towards cultural activism (Buser et al. 2013; Long 2013) has highlighted the subversive power of ordinary arts and everyday culture in response to neoliberal forces and developments. This paper focused on how ordinary cultural practice and everyday creativity has highlighted the need to reshape our understanding of urban cultural practice, development and policy. When we shift our focus from mainstream arts investment and institutional intervention to the dynamic relationship between citizen cultural participation and the city in times of project failure, social disruption or economic crisis, a different perspective can emerge. Unrecognised cultural producers and everyday creatives, who feel excluded and isolated by their urban environment, lack the opportunities to invent and apply creative strategies in times of ‘hype’. However, they can still be active urban agents that use unpredictable and unplanned tactical creative practices to re-signify and disrupt the schematic ordering of their urban reality produced through official institutional strategic practices.

On the contrary, official cultural strategies are too visible and firm to be flexible and adaptable to extreme or crucial circumstances; they are limited by the possibilities of the moment. As de Certeau has commented in his work, the weaker the forces at the disposition of the strategist, the more the strategies will be turned into tactics, meaning that a tactic is determined by the absence of power of the institutional actors in a city. In this line, and in calling to reset the agenda of the relationship between art and the city, we suggest that we should re-orient our attention towards how culture engages in the mundane life of cities (beyond the hype) or, as in the case of Athens, develops new tactics and forms of engagement when cities go through a moment of deep crisis. Vradis (2019, 696) has suggested that ‘as the neoliberal dogma intensifies and tightens, ever-more elements of our everyday come under assault’. Arts and culture have become another element in our city that has been hijacked by the neoliberal agenda and has been turned into official and instrumental topo-strategies. However, at times of crisis, they can be repossessed by everyday citizens in the form of creative topo-tactics. Ordinary people can individualise formal culture that is institutionally imposed, alter its meaning and re-appropriate it in everyday situations and ordinary settings. In agreement with other cultural scholars (Gross and Wilson 2020), we argue for the importance of everyday engagement with culture, as a critical ingredient for inhabiting, shaping and feeling a core part of our urban environments. Drawing from our empirical findings, we present an alternative scenario through the case study of AFF. This is presented not to criticise other institutional attempts for widening the cultural participation in our cities. Neither we propose that a new model should be developed so that each city can have their version of an AFF. With our work, we wish to make a case for looking at art in the city beyond institutional frameworks and circumstances of hype to discover how other ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ cultural projects might shape or reshape the relationship of art and urban life. This seems further confirmed by others (Gentle and McGuirk 2018) looking at the growth in alternative cultural spaces ‘ironically, be more likely to take root in so called less successful cities economically’ (Hollands 2019, 746). In Athens, the cultural institutional decline caused by the financial crisis and the austerity measures affected the supply and demand for conventional forms of cultural consumption. The recession also reduced the governmental pressure towards internationalising the image of Athens. All these led to the creation of more space for alternative visions of urban culture to emerge that questioned what the Athenian culture is as well as how and where it should be expressed.

We have shown through the case study of AFF that, as predicted by Souliotis (2013), the Athenian cultural landscape has significantly changed during the crisis period. We argue that it has become more diverse and less consumption-oriented. However, what emerged was also a new focus on alternative modes of cultural production, consumption and participation that reject traditional structures. The use of alternative existing resources (public and private non-arts spaces), different methods of exchange (non-market mediated community exchanges of resources) and new forms of organisation (creative social enterprises, community-based cooperatives) have mobilised an active part of the citizens that introduced novel visions of cultural representation and everyday creativity in our modern cities. Ideas and practices of shared community ownership of resources and urban space enable us to expand the discourse on the importance of diverse creative economies in the city that can offer exchange opportunities between citizens, activating new modes of cultural development (Wilson et al. 2020). In times of austerity and institutional decline, ordinary creative practice can provide opportunities for adapting to the new challenging circumstances, push against dominant spatial structures and resist to neoliberal models of cultural development.

At the same time, and extending de Certeau’s theory, we show how everyday cultural practice can also become re-appropriated by institutional forces and subsumed by official state and private entities. Formal and diachronic creative topo-strategies interact with and are constantly contradicting spontaneous and improvised everyday creative topo-tactics in an ongoing battle of repression and expression. This continuous cycle of the adoption but also co-optation of both the institutional and the everyday cultural practice is what makes us reconsider the relationship of art and the city. Our empirical findings further develop and contextualise de Certeau’s urban theory by looking at the undertheorised process of the institutionalisation and de-institutionalisation of the everyday. In other words, our work suggests that strategies and tactics do not operate in isolation; they interact with and form each other. Strategies are utilised and re-appropriated by tactics and tactics get inspired, motivated, and, even, deployed by strategies. We, therefore, argue that this ongoing process of redistribution of power between the institutional and the non-institutional urban actors is an area that needs to be further examined and theorised.

Many of us have fallen victims of thinking that ECoC programmes and similar forms of cultural hype make the most exciting case studies to argue about the benefits of urban art and attract resources and funds for cultural infrastructure in major cities. But what if our academic community could commit to providing a narrative about the interesting dynamics that everyday cultural participation shapes in our cities, affecting the lives of hundreds of individuals and communities? From this more mundane—compared to large cultural investments and projects—perspective, we advance three key points, which we hope will become central streams of inquiry for future research agendas. First, we propose that it is time to move beyond conceptualisations, primary research and case studies that explore the relationship between the arts and the city as solely framed around large cultural investment programmes. Such strategic initiatives paint only one side of the picture, moments of hype and disillusion side-effects. We argue, instead, that research on how art and culture are lived and contested in cities during mundane times or times of deep crisis (see Sanul and van Heur 2018) could provide valuable insights about a more democratic and inclusive experience of our urban environments. This forms the foundation of our second recommendation, which is used to motivate scholars and policy makers to theorise the everyday and explore art and culture in cities as a continuous process of communication, connection and reconfiguration of meanings within but also outside the institutional arts frameworks. Art in the city is much more than the product of cultural institutions and the tool for city branding exercises; it is a process of everyday interaction and negotiation, involving everyday resistance and imagining, social critique and political re-orientation (see Buser et al. 2013; Love and Mattern 2013). Everyday creativity in the city and participatory forms of art can be a silent and crafty urban cultural practice that enables individuals to unconsciously navigate within an urban context. In this view, cultural urban tactics employed by creative citizens differ from institutional cultural strategies or cultural activism and protest initiatives organised by artists since they are not conscious attempts of resistance and revolt. Instead, they are defensive, opportunistic and, often, ephemeral actions of solidarity that have the potential to redefine asymmetrical relationships between urban social actors and institutional organising bodies. Third, we wish to inspire a willingness to embrace the complexity and messiness of the arts and culture in cities (Comunian 2019). Urban and cultural scholars, as well as art practitioners, need to engage with lived cultural articulations and experiences across all levels, from macro-policy planning, to meso-community and networks platforms to the micro-experience of everyday citizens (Love and Mattern 2013). This engagement needs to happen longitudinally to deeply engage with and reflect upon cultural relations, challenges and opportunities that emerge, develop and evolve but also fade away, demise and reconfigure over time within our urban communities.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge and thank the research participants for sharing their work and experiences with us. Dr Zafeirenia Brokalaki would also like to thank the organisers and volunteers of Athens Fringe Festival for providing valuable insights and for allowing her to participate in a range of artistic activities and events in the context of the festival. In addition, we would like to thank Dr Jonathan Gross for commenting on earlier drafts of the paper and two anonymous reviewers who have provided us with insightful feedback that has greatly improved the paper. Last, Dr Roberta Comunian would like to acknowledge exchanges and discussions with Dr Tamsyn Dent, Dr Jonathan Gross, Dr Bridget Conor and Prof. Nick Wilson as part of the European funded Horizon 2020 project DISCE (Developing Inclusive and Sustainable Creative Economies).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Dr Roberta Comunian acknowledges the support of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme under [grant agreement number 822314].

Notes on contributors

Zafeirenia Brokalaki

Zafeirenia Brokalaki is Lecturer in Marketing (Markets, Ethics and Aesthetics) at the University of Leicester School of Business (ULSB), Department of Marketing, Innovation, Strategy and Operations (MISO). Email: [email protected]

Roberta Comunian

Roberta Comunian is Reader in Creative Economy at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Email: [email protected]