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CURATING POST-INDUSTRIAL AND/OR UNUSED SPACE, Municipal governments and…

- - - - Lefebvre's spatial triad (from The Production of Space, 1974):
        Argues that space is not an empty, passive container waiting to be filled, but an active social product created through human practice, power, and capital.
        
        Conceived Space (Representations of Space)
        
        Space as conceptualized by architects, urban planners, real estate developers, municipalities and cartographers. It is abstract, quantitative, mapped and tied to the forces of production/capital.
        
        Perceived Space (Spatial Practice)
        
        The physical, empirical space of daily movement, routines, and physical infrastructure. It encompasses how people physically navigate the built environment. It is observable, functional, and ideally ensures societal cohesion and continuity.
        
        Lived Space (Representational Spaces)
        
        Space as directly experienced, felt, and inhabited by its residents through images, symbols, memories, and informal social interactions. It is symbolic and deeply tied to local history and identity.
    - - Capital is the driving force that reconfigures physical landscapes to extract value.
        
        Capital moves lived space into "conceived space" which is the opposite of prioritizing community life.
      - SANITIZATION
        
        The "clean spectacle" (Claire Fontaine, The Visitor as a Commercial Partner: Notes on the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019):
        Refers to the hyper-managed, aestheticized, and ethical sanitizing that large global art events place over extractive urban economies.
        
        Presents an image of high culture, intellectual rigor, and progressive values, while physically operating on top of unsustainable urban destruction.
    - - The transformation of a low value, working class, or post-industrial urban area into a high value, middle to upper-class residential and commercial district.
        
        Artistic mode of production can aestheticize urban space and post-industrial decay, therefore acting as a structural catalyst for gentrification. (Martha Rosler, Culture Class, 2013)
        
        Public art being stripped away from site-specificity. Under capital, art is no longer generated by or for a specific community, but is deployed as portable aesthetic signage to signal economic modernization to investors (Miwon Kwon, Public Art and Urban Identities, 2002)
      - The urban environment must be structured for rapid, superficial visual consumption. The city becomes a series of photo-opportunities rather than a place of ongoing social life (John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 1990)
  - - - Contemporary art and urban spaces function as performative arenas where historical, political, and social life are endlessly "reenacted" as sanitized cultural commodities (Sven Lütticken, An Arena in Which to Reenact, 2005)
        
        Lütticken uses the metaphor of the arena to describe how contemporary institutions (museums, biennials, gentrified public squares) contain and regulate life
- - - - Re-activating the sacred
        
        The use of the 12 deactivated modernist/brutalist post-war churches who historically have been spaces that provide psychological refuge, quietude, and a sense of spiritual or community continuity.
        
        Manifesta 16 protected these places from total commodification or complete structural change, especially in neighborhoods facing systemic disinvestment.
        
        Solution to G. Perriam's concern that sacred spaces invaded by urban developpers risk being flattened or displaced by tourist infrastructure (Sacred Spaces, Healing Places: Therapeutic Landscapes of Spiritual Significance, 2014)
      - Un-renovated modernist architecture
        
        The biennial left the churches intentionally un-renovated. This decision preserved their lived spatial memory, including their architectural flaws, patina, and historical context (post-industrial Brutalism).
        
        Contrast this against standard gentrification, where developers erase local memory through "high design" renovation and sterile corporate art asethetics (Martha Rosler, Culture Class, 2013).
    - - Participatory programming
        
        i.e. Ferdane Satır Tea Garden
        
        This is site-specific co-design built on existing needs, contrasting Miwon Kwon's critique of public art used as a portable, generic "placemaking" brand imposed on a city (Public Art and Urban Identities, 2002).
      - Local co-ownership
        
        The project did more than consult. It established deeper partnerships (some starting 2 years prior) with existing local collectives, non-profits, and community groups (Manifesta Foundation, 2026)
        
        The goal was to empower residents as active agents and co-creators, not passive subjects to be documented or "educated" or be part of the traditional tourist spactacle
    - - De-commodification of access
        
        100% Free Admission to all 12 main venues for 100 days
        
        Opposite of the "clean spectacle" where the visitor is transformed into a "commercial partner" whose spending fuels extraction (Fontaine). Manifesta 16 rejects this relationship entirely.
      - Refusal of sterilization
        
        By activating unused churches (unlike the so called white cube gallery) and co-designing ongoing social practices, the biennial avoids sterility. It engages lived history and current daily life rather than a high-art performance of community (Lutticken)
        
        Oppsoite of Sven Lütticken's metaphor of the curated "arena" where radical history is safely "reenacted" for an elite audience.
      - Solution for over-tourism
        
        The biennial's explicit priority was regional social utility over attracting global, high-spending tourists
        
        Venues were decentralized across neighborhood points (not city centers), making them easily accessible by local public transport and integrated into daily life, rather than being consolidated as a "destination" to experience.
        
        Opposite of MacCannall's theory of the "staged authenticity" (The Tourist, 1976).
    - - Shared memory
        
        The biennial activated local memory to counter the erasure of gentrification.
        
        Focus on the histories of the Ruhr's Gastarbeiter (guest worker) populations, particularly Turkish and Polish immigrants, whose labor built the region (Manifesta Foundation, 2026)
      - Social infrastructure
        
        Instead of leaving behind a sculpture, the biennial left behind functional neighborhood assets like community centers and gardens.
        
        Rooting residents in their neighborhood, designed to prevent the spatial root shock and displacement that typically follows gentrification.