Inhabiting the Palace: lessons learned from an alliance to activate a disused citizen space

Inhabiting the Palace is an initiative of community cultural activation around an unfinished architecture: the Palacio del Cerezo, in Extremadura. After having been a beneficiary of the Alliances for a Cultural Democracy call in 2020, Amparo Moroño, cultural manager of the Association of Municipalities of the Jerte Valley, tells here in detail how these years have passed building and articulating community around the Palacio del Cerezo in alliance with the architecture studio cAnicca. We hope that this testimony can inspire the conception and creation of other alliances to strengthen cultural democracy through art and mediation.

Inhabiting the Palace is a citizen process of activating an unfinished architecture. A public building that was conceived as a congress centre in the agricultural region of the Jerte Valley and that is currently a space whose construction process, far from the original project, has ended, but without a proposal for content or a management model. From the alliance between the Culture Program of the Mancomunidad del Valle del Jerte and the collective of architects and mediators cAnicca, this initiative arises that aims to articulate a citizen process of collective thought and activation of cultural proposals for the near future of the Palacio del Cerezo. Their proposal aims to turn it into a space for cultural criticism and collective thought, but also into a place from which to propose activation proposals that can improve the living conditions of the people who live in the area and establish collaborative work dynamics that strengthen the social and cultural ecosystems in the territory.

How did you find out about the Alliances for a Cultural Democracy call, and why did you decide to present the project Inhabiting the Palace?

All of us who are part of this project have been dedicated for years to artistic mediation, art and education practices, collaborative cultural production or community culture practices, so we carefully follow all the calls of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, which are a very important support for our sector.

The arrival of a call such as Alliances for Cultural Democracy brought us enormous joy, since it meets a need that we have been experiencing for a long time, both in our experience of working in collectives and in our work from cultural entities or institutions. This call looks at the need for complementarity and development of formulas and structures for teamwork between public administrations and independent groups. We believe that it is necessary to strengthen spaces for public-social collaboration and this call is a way to explore formulas and detect fragilities and challenges in this regard

Tell us where the Inhabiting the Palace project was before joining Alliances for a Cultural Democracy 2020. What was the pre-existing relationship between the members of the alliance? How did you approach the project? Were activities being carried out previously?

Inhabiting the Palace, as a project, arises at the same time as the call. The Commonwealth had long had a series of concerns in relation to the Palacio del Cerezo, a building that had been in disuse for years and that had been generating discomfort and disillusionment in the community. Months before the call we had visited the space with Thais and Carlos, from the cAnicca collective, who were carrying out a project in the region. That’s where the first informal conversations between the Commonwealth and CAnnicca emerged. The launch of the call in March 2020 provided us with specific coordinates with which to shape this proposal, all understanding that the Palacio del Cerezo needed a first project that would work with the community, collectively, on the clues towards its future activation.

How did the alliance with cAnnica come about and what lessons have you been able to draw from this collective experience?

The decision to form an alliance arose from putting in dialogue the scope of work of cAnicca (architecture and participatory urbanism, the processes of work and thinking with people about the places they inhabit…) with the needs that we detected in the territory: a space in disuse and a desire on the part of the Commonwealth to open a conversation with the inhabitants of the territory about its possible forms of activation in the territory. in the near future.

The experience of working in alliance is enriching and complex, as is any process of collaboration or collective cultural production in which agents of diverse nature participate, affected by conditions, situations, desires, experiences… that make us situate ourselves differently in the processes. I think it is important in this model of working in alliance to be attentive to the opportunity for learning and mutual enrichment that this diversity of agents in the same work team offers us

Tell us more about the specific social issues that Inhabiting the Palace focuses on and the transformative mediation methodologies you are using to address them.

As time goes by, we see that Inhabiting the Palace is an ambitious and complex process, which walks in many directions and has effects on different layers. One of the initial objectives clearly had to do with the activation of a building that had been empty for years, in a complex administrative situation and with the possibilities of articulating community cultural policies around this physical space. The project takes the form of a collective investigation in which we ask ourselves two questions: on the one hand, what cultural needs and interests do the people living in this rural territory experience? And, on the other hand, how can a physical space such as the Palacio del Cerezo function as a tool to meet these needs? The process we are experiencing revolves around the conversations that are generated with the residents of the villages around these two questions.

What would you say has been the impact that Inhabiting the Palace has generated in its context, during the last two years?

Little by little, a small community is emerging, a group of people actively linked to the project and, therefore, an experience of networking between inhabitants of different municipalities in the region. This was something very important for us, since in the initial diagnosis we had detected an inertia to work more locally.

We have opened a conversation about the need – or not – for a cultural space in the region, about the need for community cultural spaces.

We are experiencing an instituting process that affects both the human realities of the project (agencies, voice spaces, etc.) and the administrative reality of the building itself, which, when the project began, was a space that we could not access and that a few weeks ago we were able to use officially. This whole process of dialogue with the public administrations is being an important and decisive part of the project.

What is the future of Inhabiting the Palace and the Cherry Palace?

Inhabiting the Palace is a process whose raison d’être is to function as a logical and essential starting point in a process that will last much longer. The project would not make sense without a next step that will consist, hopefully, of materializing the proposals agreed upon in this first project, strengthening a governance model of a public-social nature and collaboratively building the cultural life of the space. We have dedicated more than half of the time of the project to activating the conversation with people and carrying out the appropriate procedures to be able to access the space. Now, little by little, people will create their own places in the space and the Palace will be activated, coming to life.

What aspects do you think a person or entity embarking on an Alliances for a Cultural Democracy project should take into account? What data, keys or tips do you think would have been useful to you at the beginning of this journey, to transmit them to new projects?

For us, the document that we presented to the call is being a fundamental work tool to which we return again and again every time we go through a crisis situation, we have to make decisions or assume changes of direction. We are seeing on the ground how important it is to build a good roadmap anchored to the context and framed theoretically and methodologically and, despite this, capable of transforming and taking shape as we go.

We are also seeing that it is important to be realistic when drafting projects in relation to the human and material resources we have, so that they are sustainable over time. It is easy, when we write projects to present to the calls, to let ourselves be carried away by the desires and possibilities that we detect when we know our context in depth. I believe that we must know how to balance this necessary enthusiasm with the real conditions we have.

In a more practical sense, something we are learning from Inhabiting the Palace is the importance of communication work, it is essential to contemplate it in the human teams and budget for it!

An inspiring message for those initiatives that are thinking of applying for the new call for ‘Alliances for a Cultural Democracy’?

The cultural ecosystems in which we carry out our work are inhabited by agents of very diverse natures, from cultural institutions to independent collectives, including associations, self-employed workers and public administrations. It is important to be able to have spaces that allow us to investigate the possibilities of work between cultural agents of different nature, that provide us with the time and resources to learn from this complexity and the possibilities for growth that emerge from putting ourselves in relationship.

Photo credits: Inhabiting the Palace