How To Create a Cultural District and Have it Vanish Into the Morning Mists of Dawn



	How To Create a Cultural District and Have it Vanish Into the Morning Mists of Dawn
Artists are akin to locusts, driving out residents and raising rent prices soon after their arrival. Why not create an arts district based upon ephemerality and mobility instead of physicality and singular preciousness. Have a group of artists create projects for street corners and sidewalks. Set up shop for a few hours in the middle of the night. Recreate your new arts district somewhere else some other time. More about the project: Artists are akin to locusts. As soon as artists move into an area it begins to decay and crumble in a sort of reverse osmosis, turning dilapidated warehouses into “livable homes”, and soon after, high priced “lofts”. Cafes, clothing, record, and bookstores accumulate and grow like spiders webs in the corners of a room. Rents begin to skyrocket, the artists move on to their new location to infest. The process has been repeated all across the US, and elsewhere, time and again. What to do? We are all “gods creatures”, and though pesky and at times annoying, the artist serves a role beneficial to society, even if it is sometimes hard to see through the haze of displacement. Everyone needs a home, a space to create and foster a sense of place and identity. Even locusts. The role of “artist districts” is not one without it benefits of course. The confluence of artists in certain localities throughout history has without doubt brought many insights and gifts to the world - Montmartre in the early 1900s, Zurich during World War One, Haight-Asbury in the 60's, the East Village in the 60's and 70's to name a brief few. "Artist districts" can serve as distinct locations of learning, shared experience, and excitement. Often on a level of immediacy that many other areas cannot. But space is an issue, and the pitfalls of gentrification remain. Though not dealing directly with the question of housing “How To…Create a Cultural District (and Have it Vanish Into the Morning Mists of Dawn)” secondarily highlights these concerns regarding so-called "artist districts"; the roles that they play in cities, and their after effects. Focusing on the benefits of temporality and mobility over the usual gripes concerning the acquisition of space and gaining a physical foothold within an area, “How To…Create a Cultural District (and Have it Vanish Into the Morning Mists of Dawn)”, for only a few hours in the middle of the night, creates an area of engagement, display, interaction, experiential localities, and a heightened sense of place. Placing/enacting works in the doorways, trees, sidewalks, grassy strips of wayward land under highway overpasses, the project creates for viewers a new area devoted to shared experience, group think, and instant communities, that seem to emerge as if out of thin air. Then, as the sun comes closer to rising again, it vanishes into the ether without a trace. This action, if repeated in a variety of areas, giving no prominence to specific location but rather the roles that many different areas can play, helps to create a sense of an artist district that is as large as the city itself. Each location fits into a larger whole and bears no greater degree of being the “it” place to be than the next. The process and participation create the cultural district, leaving the living up to us. - Red76 (August 2005, Portland, Or.)