Holding Spaces:
cultural institutions, experimental practices and the politics of where we gather
Issue 14 – European Alternatives Journal
(September 2026 | English)
In collaboration with Scomodo
On the occasion of the reopening of Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo – one of Southern Europe’s most storied theatres, now returning to life as a space of collective cultural and political imagination – and of the Cultural Assembly that European Alternatives will co-host in Palermo in November 2026, this issue of the EA Journal turns its attention to cultural spaces: what they are, what they do and what it takes to keep them alive and genuinely open.
Cultural spaces are often discussed as infrastructure: venues, buildings, programmes, institutions. But what matters is not only their physical form but the social relations and the new imaginaries they make possible. They are, before anything else, crossings of bodies: what a space allows happens first in how living bodies move through it, gather, occupy and are seen within it, often more decisively than in its walls or its declared mission.
How does the same space change in role, value and disruptive potential depending on where it sits within a city, at its centre, at its margins, in a periphery?
A neighbourhood theatre, a self-managed social space, a festival idea, a library, an online archive, a public square: each creates its own rules of access, visibility and participation. Some spaces encourage encounter and collective agency; others reproduce existing boundaries and dynamics, however open they may appear.
Today, these spaces are being reshaped by powerful economic and political forces. Rising rents, tourism development, shrinking public investment and increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable impact have transformed the conditions under which cultural initiatives operate. In many cities, the very places that once enabled experimentation are becoming harder to sustain.
At the same time, new forms of cultural organisation continue to emerge. Communities occupy abandoned buildings, establish cooperative models, reinvent local institutions and create temporary autonomous environments that challenge dominant ways of producing and sharing culture. These initiatives remind us that cultural space is never simply given; it is constantly negotiated, contested and remade.
Issue 14 focuses on cultural spaces as sites of struggle, imagination and collective practice. We invite contributions that examine how cultural spaces are governed, who is able to access them, and how relationships between culture, territory and power are changing. We are particularly interested in experiences that complicate familiar distinctions between institution and autonomy, centre and periphery, local engagement and transnational networks, as well as reflections on the legacy of subcultural identities and the forms of belonging that emerge beyond them.
Some of the questions we’d like to explore are:
- What does it mean to govern a cultural space collectively, and what does collective governance actually require?
- How do funding structures – public, private, European – shape what a space can and cannot do?
- What is lost and what is gained when a grassroots space becomes an institution?
- How do local cultural spaces connect to transnational networks without losing their rootedness?
- What does “independence” mean for a cultural organisation that depends on public money?
- Who is missing from spaces that claim to be open, and why?
- What can performing arts, theatre, and live practice offer that other cultural forms cannot, in terms of civic encounter and democratic imagination?
- How do communities reclaim spaces that have been closed, abandoned, or instrumentalised?
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
We invite contributions that are politically engaged, analytically sharp, and imaginatively bold, from artists, activists, cultural workers, researchers, organisers, and anyone who has spent time thinking about where culture happens and who it is for.
We are particularly interested in work grounded in specific places and practices, rather than in abstractions about “civil society” or “cultural policy.” Tell us about a space you know.
Possible themes include (but are not limited to):
- The politics of reopening: what it takes to bring a cultural space back to life, and for whom
- Institutional capture and its alternatives: when does a grassroots space stop being one?
- Subculture and its discontents: rethinking cultural hierarchies from the margins
- Theatre, performance, and the assembly: live practice as civic infrastructure
- Cultural spaces and democratic participation: assemblies, co-creation, and the question of who decides
- Youth as co-creators, not audiences: how cultural spaces can be genuinely shaped by and for young people, beyond tokenism and managed participation
- European funding and its conditions: what the Creative Europe model enables and forecloses
- Transnational cultural networks: solidarity, extraction, or something in between?
- The geography of cultural access: cities, peripheries, and the spaces in between
- Digital cultural commons: what “space” means when the gathering is online
- Architecture, ownership, and the built politics of cultural infrastructure
FORMATS
We are open to a wide range of forms and tones. Contributions can be analytical, narrative, speculative or experimental.
We welcome:
- Analytical essays
- Political essays or think-pieces
- Investigative or journalistic writing
- Personal or collective testimonies
- Fiction, letters, speculative or poetic formats
- Visual storytelling, graphic work or collage
- Availability to join us in an episode of our podcast
- Audio, video or multimedia proposals (for online publication)
- Other creative or hybrid formats
Previously published and unpublished works are both welcome.
Submission Guidelines
To submit a finalised article, please follow the guidelines here.
Final article submission deadline:
1 AUGUST 2026
For any questions or to discuss an idea before submitting, contact the editors Noemi and Marta at:
journal@euroalter.com
Final contributions may be translated into English or publication. We are happy to receive proposals in other languages.
Please note: this is a non-commercial publication and we are unfortunately unable to offer payment for contributions.
About the EA Journal
The EA journal is a space to imagine alternatives beyond the nation-state. It contains think-pieces, articles, artistic and cultural contributions, podcasts, videos and more on a broad range of topics and themes spanning democracy, culture, equality, decolonisation, social movement organising and more. In 2023, we relaunched the European Alternatives journal. First published in 2007, the journal has long been a space to map out visions, ideas and pathways for an alternative, open and radically more democratic Europe.