Taking root without taking over: Two case studies on the micropolitics between art, gentrification, and agency.

Is there a way to act together in cities that are increasingly dividing us? Many see artists and galleries as a bellwether for the first wave of displacement of low-income individuals and families in economically vulnerable communities. This MA paper examines how cultural institutions—including galleries and universities—play a role in gentrification, through a qualitative research methodology, using two neighbourhoods as case studies, and by interviewing five locals from each district. The thesis seeks to go further than a moralistic binary of separating good from bad practices—instead cultivating ways to address the various entanglements and contradictions within gentrification processes, and of cultural workers, who find themselves at the intersection of agency and precarity. The first locality examined is Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, USA, where arguments made by rooted residents dragged art spaces out of the sanctum of tacit valorisation. Here a clear politicised conflict exposed art and the cultural spaces of display/inquiry, as neither harmless, neutral, nor apolitical. Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion become the framework for a subtle and gradual encroachment in Nord Holland, Kassel, Germany, the second area of research. The juxtaposition goes beyond using the two locations as a comparison, to preferably laying out on the table the multitudes, solidarities, fractures, traumas, and contradictions. The study raises questions of the unseen ripple effects by artists—flows of normalising or disrupting, devaluing or inflating, reverberations that are not felt sometimes for decades—asking how can we make the distinction between practices that enrich the community and those of exploitation and extraction? How can artists and educators address our ability to take a political stand when material reality cannot remove itself from institutional entanglements? From the perspective of an artist, educator, and researcher, this paper engages in the possibilities of another future relationship to spatial usage—seeking solidarity with a community by working with existing structures to address relationships between art, culture, and displacement