Access to culture is usually discussed in terms of feelings: inclusion, hospitality, a sense of welcome. What I learnt during a series of interviews in two countries is that the feeling of belonging in a cultural space is rarely just a feeling. It is a piece of infrastructure: a voucher, a pricing structure, an administrative rationale, a workshop lasting several months. Someone has to set it up, and someone has to keep it going, usually without much recognition.
This is the common thread that ultimately ran through four seemingly unrelated stories produced for More Than Art this season. A dancer whose body bears the marks of a colonial history that official archives have never bothered to record. Two artistic communities, in Ruigoord and OostWest, which have built their own spaces because nobody offered them one. And, most recently, two theatres at opposite ends of Milan and Amsterdam, each negotiating in very different bureaucratic languages over who is actually allowed to walk through their doors.
What ‘accessibility’ costs in practice
At PimOff, in the southern suburbs of Milan, project manager Antonella Miggiano described a specific set of decisions designed to challenge a very common assumption: that a ticket costing ten or fifteen euros is already affordable. It isn’t, for a family of five. That is why children are admitted free of charge. Theatre courses are priced according to family income rather than a fixed fee. Antonella emphasised strongly that this is not viewed internally as charity. It is seen as a correction.
At ZID Theatre, in Amsterdam-West, artistic director Karolina described another approach that tackles the same issue. Long before a script exists, ZID develops its productions through months of co-creation workshops with communities whose stories are not usually sought out — including, for a recent production, a series of sessions on board a converted ship housing 1,500 refugees.
Karolina refers to the underlying principle as ‘breaking the fourth wall’: not a staging technique, but a metaphor for the economic and symbolic barriers that usually determine who is even allowed into a theatre. Two institutions, two countries, two completely different bureaucratic vocabularies, which independently reach the same conclusion: that access must be consciously and repeatedly created, rather than merely proclaimed.
The theoretical framework
Three ideas, drawn from a Master’s programme in Art and Society, shaped the way I listened to all four episodes, even though they were never explicitly mentioned in the podcast. Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of an ‘archive of feelings’ suggests that certain experiences – particularly those associated with marginalised or counter-cultural communities – leave their most lasting traces not in official documents, but in atmosphere, gestures and tone.
That is why a location visit in each episode was never treated as an afterthought; it was primary material. By contrast, the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant regards spaces and communities as held together by circulating affects rather than by institutions alone, which shaped the way I listened to what it feels like to belong to a place, rather than merely to how it is governed. And Pierre Bourdieu’s description of cultural capital provided the sharper, more structural question underpinning all of this: who is authorised to call themselves an artist, and who is merely permitted to visit?
Together, these four episodes form a single overarching thesis: the right to belong to a cultural space is never truly free, even if the ticket is. Somewhere, someone is carrying out the constant, unobtrusive work of keeping a door open. All the practitioners interviewed this season described that effort not as generosity, but as something closer to justice – a correction to a situation that was never fair to begin with.
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