Artistic places of civil initative[Lieux artistiques d'initiative civile]

From the 1990s, a multiplicity of project spaces with a strong artistic dimension have developed in France, initiated by civil society actors and pursuing non profit primary goals. Their essential role - although still insufficiently recognized in terms of cultural development - calls for a more precise identification of what they are. After an initial general study carried out in 2022 on some two hundred of these places, this research aims to highlight the specific mode of entrepreneurial arrangement that is emerging, beyond the irreducible singularity of each of them. The corpus of this work is made up of eight associative cases, half of which are located in rural areas and the other half in urban contexts. The study explores four major components of their entrepreneurial arrangement : the primacy of the overall project, in which the artistic dimension is strongly structuring and which involves constant attention to the territory in which they are located, to the people who live there and to the organizations that operate there ; the plurality of activities and projects, both simultaneous and successive, the coordination of which must constantly be reinvented ; the decision-making dynamics and the governance partly distributed among several instances, mobilizing voluntary and employee actors ; a multi-faceted and plural economic model, whose structural precariousness constantly endangers the objective of sustainability and development of the overall project. Ultimately, what emerges for each place is an operating mode in the form of a singular entrepreneurial community and an activist participation in an economic development pattern relating to both social and solidarity economy and the contemporary resurgence of the commons.