Access to culture is usually discussed in the language of feeling: inclusion, welcome, hospitality. What a season of interviews across two countries taught me is that belonging to a cultural space is rarely a feeling at all. It’s a piece of infrastructure: a voucher, a pricing formula, a governance argument, a months-long workshop. Somebody has to build it, and somebody has to keep maintaining it, usually without much recognition. This is the thread that ended up running underneath four otherwise unrelated stories produced this season for More Than Art. A dancer whose body carries a colonial history that official archives never bothered to keep. Two artist communities, in Ruigoord and OostWest, that built their own spaces because nobody offered them one. And, most recently, two theatres on opposite edges of Milan and Amsterdam, each negotiating, in very different bureaucratic languages, who actually gets to walk through their doors.
What “access” costs in practice
At PimOff, in the southern periphery of Milan, project manager Antonella Miggiano described a specific chain of decisions built to correct a very ordinary assumption: that a ten- or fifteen-euro ticket is already accessible. It isn’t, for a family of five. So children go free. Theatre courses are priced against a family’s income rather than a flat fee. None of it, Antonella was careful to stress, is framed internally as charity. It’s framed as a correction.
At ZID Theatre, in Amsterdam West, artistic director Karolina described a different mechanism aimed at the same problem. Long before a script exists, ZID builds performances through months of co-creation workshops with communities that are not usually asked for their stories — including, for one recent production, a series of sessions held aboard a repurposed ship that was housing fifteen hundred refugees.
Karolina calls the underlying principle “breaking the fourth wall”: not a staging technique, but a metaphor for the economic and symbolic walls that ordinarily decide who is allowed into a theatre at all. Two institutions, two countries, two completely different bureaucratic vocabularies, arriving, independently, at the same conclusion: that access has to be engineered, deliberately and repeatedly, rather than simply declared.
The theoretical scaffolding
Three ideas, carried over from an MA in Arts and Society, shaped how I listened across all four episodes, even where they never surfaced explicitly on air. Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of an archive of feelings suggests that certain experiences, particularly those tied to marginal or countercultural communities, leave their most durable traces not in official documents, but in atmosphere, gesture, tone of voice.
That is why a site visit, in every episode, was never treated as colour added after the fact; it was primary material. Sara Ahmed’s and Lauren Berlant’s work, meanwhile, frames spaces and communities as held together by circulating affects rather than by institutions alone, which shaped how I listened for what a place feels like to belong to, rather than only how it is governed. And Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital supplied the sharper, more structural question underneath all of it: who is authorised to call themselves an artist, and who is merely permitted to visit.
Put together, these four episodes make a single, cumulative claim: the right to belong to a cultural space is never actually free, even when the ticket is. Someone, somewhere, is doing the ongoing, unglamorous work of holding a door open. Every practitioner interviewed this season described that labour not as generosity, but as something closer to justice, a correction to an arrangement that was never fair to begin with.
