Creativewashing - A new currency?
Come inside a Copenhagen neighbourhood of artists and seagulls struggling with their new role as characters in a capitalistic dream. Malin will bring you along on a philosophical stroll through real estate visions and memories.
Inside the art collective © Malin Annie Jansson
It was Sunday before Christmas. The sun baked through the wobbly windows. Coffee powder swirled inside the cups, rolling tobacco crumpled on the table, and the green sofa buckled under many years of use.
“It’s not right that we need to hide and pretend that we don’t exist! We need to convince them of our value.” The input was part of a conversation between four artists, trying to lay down a strategy for our upcoming housing situation on the outskirts of Copenhagen.
Different events had resulted in our art collective - housing over 20 artists - losing our rent money. And now, we tried to agree on a strategy on how to talk with our landlord without being evicted.
“I know you are an idealist, but the reality is that these guys don’t care about our values. They could earn ten times more if they got new tenants. Just look out there...”, one of the artists responded pointing out the neighbouring building “everyone else is gone, it’s just us left.” The Everyone else he referred to was the karate club, the urban gardening collective and the cardboard factory. Our diverse building had become a modern office building with damp-proof windows and, as the only sign of life after office hours; cleaning companies swiping floors.
We were the only ones still on a solidaric members-based cleaning schedule. And the only ones with damp window frames. The damp we were fine with, but the symbolism of them was like a bad omen: are they trying to push us out? Would they soon increase the rent - again?
Inside the art collective © Malin Annie Jansson
The dream of the creative
I went out in front of our redbrick building. Once it housed leather workshops and pig feedstock since 2014 it has housed us. A non-profit driven artist collective known for parties and odd personalities. Our discussion that morning made me wonder: did we even have any value in this neighbourhood anymore?
“The area is particularly known for attracting public and creative businesses (…) benefiting from the low rent level.”, says the real estate company in front of me, currently rebuilding a former social-economical enterprise into a corporate office building. It was the irony of our new neighbours calling the area a “low rent area” when they were the reason for our rising rent, that made the seagulls laugh all the way down the street. I also wondered who these creative businesses were that they bragged about. It was us.
Our own landlord promoted our building similarly: “New York-inspired architecture, designed for offices, studios, and workshops.” Since we were the only unpolished workshop left, I guess we were part of their PR, too.
Was “creativewashing”- the arts equivalent to greenwashing - a thing in the housing market?
Inside the art collective © Malin Annie Jansson
I couldn’t find any information on Google, but it led me to the formulation ”Creative destruction”. Creative destruction (1942) is a theory of economics by Joseph Schumpeter, explaining a “circle of life” for capitalistic development. The theory had been further developed by the geographer David Harvey. According to Harvey, a capitalist system will always balance between preserving the value of previous investments and destroying the same investments to accumulate more value and capital (Limits to Capital, 1982).
According to senior lecturers Anders Lund Hansen and Henrik Gutzon Larsen at Lund University, these constant destructions create “cracks” which temporarily give space to alternative lifestyles, such as, for example, artists. But in the end, these alternative spaces are just used as strategic tools to, quoting Hansen and Larsen: “pave the way for a new round of investments” (The right to the City, 2012).
The talk of alternative lifestyles made me think of an interview with the artist Jakob Jakobsen: “The gentrification is a lot about taste. It talks to a specific clientele and a specific lifestyle. It’s a kind of suburbanization, where they reproduce suburban values with private gardens and quiet environments. It’s another, more individualistic form of lifestyle (…)” (Dagbladet Information, 2011)
Inside the art collective © Malin Annie Jansson
Spiderman, no more
Our neighbourhood, I realized as I walked past the local mosque and the house with faded spiderman posters, had started to fit in this new lifestyle. Even though there were still musicians banging on drums late at night in the studios and sewing machines and collective meetings spitting fire in the mornings, our courtyard now had a sign of “private area”, and bright lamps and cameras had been mounted to scare away nighttime youngsters hanging around.
I passed the empty premises of The Art school for the disabled at Svanevej. They moved five months ago. But artists leaving the neighbourhood was nothing new. The Candy factory, a community-based culture house, had to move since their house was sold and transformed into expensive student apartments. When I pass the shiny white façade of this address today, Jakobsen’s words dance next to me on the pavement. The rich individualistic households had won over the volunteer-based collective culture.
David Harvey once stated: “We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights.” (The Right to the City, 2003)
If this is true, we may assume that our best currency in this housing market is our authenticity; the capitalistic wet dream and the artists’ greatest fortune. Is our new value taking shape of a living advertising pillar?
Back on the green sofa that winter afternoon we didn’t come to a conclusion. But I wish to think that our discussions may lead to a delay of the next jerk in the cogwheel and expand our temporary “crack” that we call home, just a tiny wobbly window frame longer.
