Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

In cities worldwide, regardless of commercial funding models, available space or political agendas, cultural spaces continue to appear, evolve and disappear. The continued existence of these types of spaces is an unstoppable force, often hard won, eked out of already existing environments, claimed in the interstices of place/space dynamics. Most often, when research is conducted on sites of creativity or culture, researchers resort to geographical analysis, using postcode, demographic and census data to analyse clusters of activity. Whilst the geographic location of the spaces and their relationship to the urban environment is important, examining sites in this external, macro way, fails to capture the intimate, nuanced data that resides within the spaces themselves. This paper, analyses specific sites of cultural production in detail, looking at the visual fabric of the site itself. In doing this, it examines cultural spaces as socio-material environments rich with unique assemblages of human and non-human actors. These actors possess emotions, characters and agency that when connected or linked to each other, come together to display assemblages about cultural place/s. Methodologically, this paper utilises a visual phenomenological approach to draw comparative insights from photographs of cultural spaces in Sydney, NSW. These images stand as a situated form of knowledge, an ontological extension of the phenomenal experience of being involved in a place as a learning practitioner-researcher.