Reclaiming participation: arts centres and the reinvention of social condensation

Following a tradition of social thought within the arts, a tradition that has been radically disenfranchised over the past four decades, I would like to propose the re-appropriation of arts institutions for use as social condensers within contemporary civic life. These spaces, once vital, cheap and convivial, run by people passionate about building community frameworks through cultural practice, are currently almost lost to the kinds of use that could be formed through the idea of the social condenser, an architecture in which, to use Jane Rendell’s analysis, might provide a transitional set of spaces in which forms of living can be rehearsed and experienced differently to those shaped by contemporary capitalism.