Page 19 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’, POWER AND CHANGE 13

I think any mechanism that brings people together, y’know even if it’s a
local café or—I mean, er, or a community arts project or mothers and
toddler groups, or anything that brings people together and erm helps to
develop relationships is gonna be a great thing. So—um, I don’t, I don’t—I
mean that’s, that’s the only—I mean if you do, if you do bring people
together and break down barriers that exist between them then you can
think of events or activities that achieve some kind of local prominence,
y’know like galas and these things are really important ’cos they pull
people together.

But, importantly, this articulation of creative energy is understood as neither
inevitable nor stable. To begin with, not everyone wants to participate in a
group: ‘some people do, some people don’t.’ And then the survival of a group is
not guaranteed. A video access centre worker commented:
It’s almost like, you can’t have a healthy human being without shelter,
food and warmth, y’know and it’s the same with groups. You can’t have a
well-established, a well sort of—a functioning group, without giving them
basic sort of, just basic elements.

Groups that do survive change their nature. Indeed, the Old Town arts centre
worker thought that they should: ‘I think there is a sort of natural life cycle to a
lot of the projects in community arts, I think the idea that you build up an
organization that’s exactly the same, and keeps doing the same kind of thing, is
wrong.’ Workers change—‘as workers we developed a lot, as well, learning how
to work with people’—and participants change too. After all, the point of
community arts is to change something, to develop participants’ confidence and
skills. In Wester Hailes, there are people ‘who are with us every single day of the
year, and moving on, in terms of their own development or whatever’. This
discourse of ‘community’ does not assume that participatory organizations will
represent everyone in the area, nor that there is only one possible form of
participation or organization. This other ‘community’ is both partial and mobile,
changing its form as the particular individuals, groups and activities that
constitute it change.
This discursive construction of an other ‘commimity’ as the growth, change
and even decay of groups is mapped in a very different spatiality from that
produced in these workers’ critique of the manipulative body politic of power.
Community arts workers see this spatiality as a network. The groups understood
as providing foci for this other ‘community’ are imagined as nodes. This seems
to be the case whether the other ‘community’ in question is one of interest or
place. The worker with people with disabilities, for example, argued for a punctual
geography of ‘appropriate usable spaces throughout the city to the benefit of
particular communities of interest, or race, or arts interest or disability interest or
whatever’; and the tape-slide project worker explained how ‘we worked with a