Artistic project-spaces. A concrete utopia for a still undeveloped future[Les espaces-projets artistiques. Une utopie concrète pour un avenir encore en friche]

This text is a new edition of an article written in 2002. Among other things, it allows to ponder about questions that have already been strongly addressed and yet remained unresolved at the end of the past century, as well as on their permanence or their particular variation one or two decades later. The article deals with the new artistic and cultural spaces that have recently multiplied in France with a will to transform the social game of art, as it is developing in the most recognized public facilities. It provides an approach to their structural similarities which can be perceived despite their extreme diversity and the singularity each of them claims to have. It is based on two first comparative studies and the observations we made on thirteen of the studied cases. These spaces are defined by their project to implement artistic practices that are more open to the different dimensions of social activities. They are the result of the present insufficient number of places able to host unusual format experiments or budding artists as well as rehearsal spaces or places to enable creations to mature. They underline the importance of the processes of elaborating a work more than to distribute its completed form and consider that the people on their territory must be given back a central place in the artistic dynamics. The flexibility of both hosted projects and teams is to be kept as well as a flexible occupancy and modularity of the premises. Thus the programming of artistic events open to the public is always combined with the development of a diversity of working and exchange modalities between artists but also with the neighbouring population. Being initiatives stemming from the civil society, their economic model remains precarious between the low revenue generated by their activity, the actual but varying importance of exchanges based on the principles of solidarity, and the variable support of local public authorities. In their will to keep control over their functioning, the governance of these project-spaces is based on various forms of both collegial and distributed decision-making. The latter are nevertheless combined with the central role of a director, at the same time moderator and coordinator of the overall project and of a small team of employees who sometimes have an insecure medium-term status. Longitudinal studies would be required to better assess over time the evolution of the objectives and of the practical functioning of these innovative experiments.