HOUSREG · Social Art as a Tool for Empowerment: Housing Deprivation and Citizen Initiatives for Change

Social Art as a Tool for Empowerment: Housing Deprivation and Citizen Initiatives for Change

Over the past decade, worsening affordability, homelessness, social and housing polarisation and new forms of housing deprivation have been an increasing concern in Europe. In addition, the financialisation of land and housing, increasing dominance of rent, commodification and cuts in social wages have degraded the lives of millions of people. Artist have been called to perform social and cultural tasks in order to fill the gaps left by absent institutions of social care while themselves trying to survive un-affordable cities. The relationship between art as a social practice and housing issues has still not been systemically covered in the academic field of research. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify two main tendencies of scholarly approaches: the approach that tends to uncritically celebrate potential of art to initiate positive social change by engaging citizens creatively in order to increase well-being and community feeling and the approach that tend to put social art down to mere symptom of power relations. First approach, coming mainly from social science, develops a non-critical perspective showing romantic image of art which is supposed to automatically have critical, political and change potential as soon as it starts to appear outside gallery or a museum space or as soon as it becomes “relational”. Other approaches coming from critical social theories tend to accuse and dismiss social art dealing with housing issues for involvement in “transnational art industry”, assisting gentrification or as tool for nullification of citizens’ resistance. The aim of this research was to shape a methodology that will bridge the gaps. The intention is to point out to contradictions of art as social practice dealing with housing issues. This project opens the question of social art in today's social constellation, dealing with its functions and effects in the framework of anomalies in housing policies. The overarching objective of this project is to deliver a new methodology that will address Social Art and Housing. In order to understand the role of artists and art in housing struggles today it is necessary to understand the relational circumstances that artists inhabit and embody, including the conditions in which they produce their art but also those in which they reproduce their lives. Addressing this need, the overarching objective of this project is to deliver a new methodology that will address social art and housing by map actors in the field of social art and housing networks, developing models of social art and housing networks and redefining the models through comparison of practices in Serbia and UK.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union