Precarious Spaces

Katarzyna Kosmala Ph.D. is Reader in Visual Culture and Organization, University of the West of Scotland, UK; Visiting Research Fellow at GEXcel, Institute of Thematic Gender Studies, Linköping University & Örebro University, Sweden and Visiting Professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a curator and freelance art writer. She researches and writes on aspects of construction and representation of gender and identity politics in contemporary (visual) culture, creative work, cultural labour and discourses of creativity, identity and community in the context of a globalising network society, art production and enterprise; arts-run projects and politics of representation.Miguel Imas is a senior lecturer in organisational and social psychology at Kingston University, London, and a research associate of the London Multimedia Lab at the London School of Economics. He is also one of the editors of Precarious Spaces.

'Cultural politics has melted into thin air, or more accurately, this once powerful New Left paradigm has been monetized by finance capital, its dissent thoroughly commodified. But all is not lost. Enter Precarious Spaces. Packed with inventive methodologies and valuable case studies co-editors Katarzyna Kosmala and Miguel Imas have mobilized a remarkable cadre of critically engaged scholars for their project, who do not so much reject their allotted state of precarity, but who instead “flip it” around to their collective advantage. Precarious Spaces is a book, as much as it is a living theoretical framework offering essential lessons about the emerging art of precariousness. Focusing primarily on the Global South, which as we know is not always in The South, Precarious Spaces maps-out a process of “inverse colonialism” whereby those who dwell along the borders of a collapsing society strategically rag-pick and recycle its left-overs in order to assemble a survivable world from whatever is at hand. As precarity itself migrates from the perimeter into the general conditions of contemporary life, Precarious Spaces proves one thing above all else: resistance is not futile.'

• Chapter 1: Why precarious spaces? Katarzyna Kosmala and Miguel Imas Chapter 2: How emergent cultural imaginaries of autonomy and planetarity can reframe contemporary precarity debatesDiana Brydon Chapter 3: From the precarious to the hybrid: The case of the Maré Complex in Rio de JaneiroLilian Fessler Vaz and Claudia Seldin Chapter 4: Painting free from gentrification: Participatory arts-based interventions in the favelas of Rio de JaneiroKatarzyna Kosmala Chapter 5: Beyond aesthetics: Poetics of Autoconstrucción in Mexico City Benjamin Parry Chapter 6: FOLi Lab: A museographic urban experiment at the Biennial of Photography in Lima, PeruGonzalo Olmos and Valeria Biffi Chapter 7: OrgansparkZ: Communities of art-space, imagination and resistance Miguel Imas and Alia Weston Chapter 8: Pockets of resistance: A look at the Mbyá-Guarani camps in Rio Grande do Sul, BrazilCristina Amélia Pereira de Carvalho and Fábio Freitas Schilling Marquesan Chapter 9: Fábricas Recuperadas in Brazil: Contextual experiences Jacob Carlos Lima, Aline Suelen Pires and Fernando Ramalho Martins Chapter 10: New technologies and media activism in Brazil: Reassembling spaces in the context of innovationLeonardo Vasconcelos Cavalier Darbilly Chapter 11: Organizing culture in favela Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro: The dynamics of precarityAlketa Peci, Daniel S. Lacerda and Vanessa Brulon Chapter 12: A much mended thing: Notes from the North Cristina Molina and Dean (Rocky) Rockwell