Artists and creative workers have long been attracted to urban environments. Yet the ‘creative city’ of the 21st century comes with its own pitfalls. From precarity at the level of the worker to gentrification at the level of the city: the creative engine starts to sputter. Therefore, after or even against the creative city, this book explores the rise of the ‘common city’. What is the value of commoning for cultural practices in urban contexts? The volume defends the hypothesis that ...

Neoliberalism has taken autonomous professional values and labour firmly in its grasp. Traditional forms of employment are replaced with post-Fordist conditions in which work has become freelance, flexible, mobile, project-based, hybrid and temporary. This way of working is not new to artists. They have seen themselves confronted with these precarious conditions since many years. Mobile Autonomy detects what modes of economy and different innovative working modalities artists and other artist...

Marlies De Munck is philosopher of culture. She teaches at the Philosophy department of the Antwerp University and at the KASK & Conservatory in Ghent. As a member of the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO) of the Antwerp Research Institute of the Arts (ARIA) she conducts research into the health of culture. Pascal Gielen is sociologist of culture. He is based at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA) of Antwerp University. There he leads the research group Culture Commons Quest O...

Artist residencies provide space, time, and concentration for making art, doing research and for reflection. Residencies are crucial nodes in international circulation and career development, but also invaluable infrastructures for critical thinking and artistic experimentation, cross-cultural collaboration, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and site-specific research. The globalization process and the demands of the creative economy have had an impact on artist residencies. Ecological ...

In de meeste landen ontsnapt het kunstonderwijs niet aan een grootschalige reorganisatie. Onderwijsinstellingen moeten zich steeds meer als ondernemingen opstellen, die om de beste of meeste leerlingen concurreren en hun doel en resultaten in management- en financiële termen uitdrukken. Het onderwijsveld is kortom een markt geworden. Of er daarbinnen nog ruimte voor kunst is, is een belangrijke vraag.

In Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm wordt onderzocht wat de effecten van deze opstelli...

In The Aesthetics of Ambiguity: Understanding and Addressing Monoculture betogen Pascal Gielen en Nav Haq dat multiculturalisme paradoxaal genoeg gebaseerd is op monocultureel denken. De publicatie verkent deze paradox door monocultuur in verschillende hedendaagse contexten te onderzoeken. Het boek wil monocultuur analyseren met behulp van een veelzijdige benadering, door historische, sociale, culturele en ideologische perspectieven samen te brengen. Kunst kan daarbij zowel dienen als middel ...

Every kind of change belongs to a form of community art’, stelt de Italiaanse filosoof Antonio Negri. Het is de omkering van het gebruikelijke adagium dat community art een deel kan zijn van gewenste maatschappelijke veranderingen. Negri stelt niet alleen de community art, haar voorstanders en critici voor een uitdagende verantwoordelijkheid, maar iedereen in de samenleving die verandering wil teweeg brengen op sociaal, politiek, economische, technologisch of ecologisch vlak. Artistiek én c...

The Covid-19 crisis teaches us how priceless human nearness is. Art and education can't do without it either. Like works of art, people lose their aura when kept at digital arm's length. Art is lifeless when it can't resonate with bodies. In Nearness, Marlies De Munck and Pascal Gielen diagnose a new reality. Only culture marks the difference between surviving and living.

Nearness is also available in Dutch as a separate publication with the title Nabijheid.