Gravari-Barbas, Maria

The Stakes of a Space-Time Appropriation of an Ephemeral Event - 2005.


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This paper aims at analyzing the relationship between a festival, by definition an ephemeral event, and the urban space in which it takes place. A festival certainly (and primarily) has a cultural and art context, but also has a spatial dimension: it occupies public space, it temporary invests different urban place that ca be durably transformed. In this sense, it is a vector of spatial strategies, either deliberate and organized, or not. These can enter in conflict with the territorial strategies of other actors on the urban scene. It is precisely this system of connections between the different local actors in relation to the production of space that we try to analyze. We have chosen the example of the city of Angoulême, a small-size city in Western France known for its International Comic Festival (FIBD), whose impacts in terms of production and appropriation of spaces are considerable.