Alongside its more prosaic role as a landlord for the 70 or so warehouse-style units in Al Quoz that are so well suited to contemporary art galleries and associated businesses, Alserkal Avenue sees itself as having something of a mission to hone the image, value and purpose of the ‘cultural district’ as an essential part of the urban fabric.
Specifically, that’s one of the functions of Alserkal Advisory, the consultancy arm of the operation, which has just announced its most far-reaching venture yet. ‘A Feral Commons’ is a co-commissioning arts project linking cultural districts on four continents – Alserkal Avenue is being joined by Jamaica’s Kingston Creative; the Onassis Stegi in Athens; and Victoria Yards in Johannesburg.
Each of these will be presenting a public art installation in response to the theme of climate change, to be unveiled this time next year. They’re very different in genesis and organisation (one non-profit, one sponsored by a wealthy foundation, one a mixed-use commercial development) and that alone should make for an interesting mix of options.
They’re also among the four dozen members of the Global Cultural Districts Network, a grouping that “fosters cooperation and knowledge-sharing among those responsible for creative and cultural districts, and engages leaders in culture and in urban development through convenings, research and collaborations in order to inform global, local and sectoral agendas”. The goal of the Feral Commons project fits into this local-is-global approach: “to harness the power of networked cultural districts [and artists in them] to respond collectively to urgent global subjects”. It’s presumably intended to be an ongoing exercise, because the present exercise is described as the ‘first cycle’.
The four projects will each be a site-specific exhibition created by local artists “in the most responsible and conscious method possible” and accompanied by a programme (details unspecified) that will engage with local communities “to further explore the theme and questions”.
Vilma Jurkute, Executive Director of Alserkal Initiatives and Alserkal Advisory (and one of the members of GCDN’s Advisory Board, along with Andrea Chung from Kingston Creative), is clearly a prime mover behind the Feral Commons project. She said the Global Co-commission “re-localises our efforts for commissioning public art” and has high hopes for it – the project “acts as an attempt to harmonise and repair our relations with our ecology, as well as recalibrate social and economic dimensions through collective thinking with peer art organisations globally in times of climate change.
“We hope this will not only lead to more sustainable practices and formulation of whole-thinking structures within the current global art ecosystem, but will also shine a light on the imperative role cultural districts play in their communities globally.”
Alserkal Advisory has appointed Tairone Bastien (right) as curator of the first cycle. Now based in Toronto, he co-curated the first two editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019 and 2022); he’s also well known to Alserkal, having spent just over two years on the Avenue as Programming Director. In that comparatively brief time he was responsible for much of Alserkal’s artistic direction, establishing a public programme and the Alserkal Residency.
Bastien actually developed the Feral Commons theme alongside the participating districts. The concept of the ‘commons’ is usually defined as land or resources shared by all people within a community, but this project invites artists to explore a more radical understanding of what the commons could mean in a multi-species world. The theme draws on the ideas of the visionary American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing – “Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place … Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes – the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons – and the elusive autumn aroma” she writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World, graphically subtitled ‘On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins’. “This book argues that staying alive – for every species – requires liveable collaborations … Without collaborations, we all die.”
Tairone Bastien’s interpretation of this is to invite each participating artist to make “a work for public space that draws on their individual beliefs, ways of knowing and being, and unique ways of working to explore the non-human relations, indeed worlds, that overlay their own”. He goes on: “I want to dream with others of radical horizontality, a vast common ground shared by humans and their more-than-human kin. And search for non-human protagonists of stories that have yet to be told.”
In the coming months, Bastien will work with the co-commissioners in each of the cultural districts to finalise proposals from artists – which may be invited or in response to an open call: we’ll have to wait for that. The full list of successful proposals will be announced early in 2023, we’re told. The criteria for selection will show critical issues related to the curatorial theme within different geographical environments and specificity to each district’s context and locality.
A Feral Commons is supported by public art and architectural design specialist UAP. That applies particularly to the use of UAP’s proprietary tools for auditing the environmental and social impact of the project, specifically UAP’s Artwork Ingredients List (provides predictive estimates on labour, materials, energy, and emissions for the lifecycle of art projects) and Public Art 360 (evaluates the impact and value of public art both quantitatively and qualitatively).
Alserkal’s cultural district partners:
Kingston Creative (Kingston, Jamaica ) is a nonprofit arts organisation started in 2017 and based on the principle that art and culture can be used for social and economic transformation. It envisions a safe and vibrant art district in Downtown Kingston based around a Creative Hub that provides a co-working space and business accelerator for creatives. Ongoing projects include the Paint the City street art murals, urban art parks and public art, and a busy events programme.
Onassis Stegi (Athens, Greece) is a multidisciplinary cultural centre funded by the Onassis Foundation to promote contemporary culture while supporting Greek artists and providing lifelong learning to people of all ages. It has a busy programme of performances and other events thanks to its facilities – 18,000m² of modern, well-equipped space on seven floors that includes two main auditoria, a lecture hall and an exhibition area. (Incidentally ‘stegi’ means ‘the roof’.)
Victoria Yards (Johannesburg, South Africa) is 30,000m² of industrial space repurposed as an integrated urban complex that has fostered an ecosystem that is as much about community and social development as it is commercial enterprise. It is however a commercial development – “a fresh take on inner city development” – and as such is probably the most similar of the three to Alserkal Avenue. It includes galleries, artisan studios, apparel shops and fashion designers, eateries, Sunday markets, and even an urban agriculture project.
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