Art Aboveground: The Politics, Spaces, and Economies of Peripheral Art Venues in Warsaw

This project follows the social worlds, political situatedness, and bureaucratic engagements of several peripheral art venues in Warsaw, Poland. It traces how the everyday activities of these venues are imbued with public and interpersonal discourse, and how they make an intervention on the politics of space, the existing infrastructures of art, and its attendant social worlds. I investigate the motivations that underpin the organizational efforts of collectives and individuals as they create and maintain spaces in which bottom-up circulation of art, and subsequent counter-cultures, become possible. How do these venues constitute and contain emerging social realities, and how do their intersections with urban revitalisation projects and established cultural instiutions shape emerging identities? Moreover, how do the “peripheries” reveal and trouble the “center,” even as they must collaborate in order to manage cultural production within a given set of -often neoliberal- constraints? And what do these emergent modes tell us about shifting political horizons in contemporary Poland and the rules of existing cultural hegemonies, which came before and remain even after the dissipation of total right-wing rule? To answer these questions I look to the intersections where these spaces are validated, contested, in friction and in collaboration. Following these negotiations will tell us more about under what conditions people are allowed to practice alternative iterations of “doing” cultural life.

By following the activity of peripheral venues and the people inside and around them, I also trace how a claim to apparently limited space unfolds parallel practices of agency, negotiation, and participation in a broader sphere of culture, both with and against the logic of scarcity that is pervasive in dominant cultural institutions. By following interactions and negotiations between venues and their neighbors, local politicians, bureaucrats, and developers, a complex picture of influence emerges, one that challenges common top-down, center-periphery understandings of state-sponsored culture and that of the fringes. Instead, we encounter an entangled cartography in which the same entanglements allow alternative venues and the people in them to shake-up or reinforce existing cultural logics.

A central goal of this project is to reexamine the vocabulary around infrastructures of art, institutions, and agency to draw out how peripheral, bottom-up infrastructures become a political modality, wherein emerging modes of being and doing intersect with emerging political horizons. Following alternative bureaucratic structures, the ways such spaces are sustained, and paying attention to their situated politics, the ethnography sheds light on how a claim to space unfolds parallel practices of agency, negotiation, and participation. By examining bottom-up venues as sites of negotiation in which people test and exercise their autonomy, the project offers new insights on everyday practices of resilience and belonging and thus contributes both to the anthropology of art and to political anthropology.