More about Maloca

Maloca is a collective of cultural production.

Its aim is to create a space for performing and visual arts, as well as interactive workshops and educational projects situated in artistic peripheries, often coinciding with diasporas of different origins. The objective is to give them visibility in urban cultural life and bring them into interaction with more established local-German artistic expressions.

The members of Maloca from different professional backgrounds are dedicated to create, produce and coordinate cultural events focused on building bridges between the diverse artistic diasporas, German artists and multiple audiences. Hence, we organise festivals, workshops as well as provide organisational structure for cultural events in collaboration with local peripheric* communities.

Maloca Cultural/artistic periphery

“Periphery” it does not only refer to subaltern groups and politically marginalised geographical areas in the world, but refers also to power relations - economic, political, cultural - between social groups. Periphery as an identity is plural, historical and fluid, rather than homogeneous, but nevertheless immersed in relations of power and hierarchy.

When it comes to artistic peripheries, these may refer to artistic groups/practices/expression, which are at the margins of hegemonic centres of cultural production/industry. Often also the hegemonic centres create a certain stereotypical and biased image about the peripheral art, e.g. in Brazil there is only samba, etc.

There is a need not only to include the marginal groups in hegemonic spaces, but also to perceive cultural/artistic production from the viewpoint of the periphery. In that sense, the edges of hegemonic centres permit to radically question the traditional ways and visions of (doing) art, which have been precisely responsible for the invisibilisation of certain artistic expressions, practices and groups, leading to a hierarchical interrelation. In other words, the focus on the artistic periphery is also to perceive the marginal practices and to bring to visibility the reflections and genres that concern the peripheral communities that often coincide with diasporic groups.

For example, movies about quilombo, peripheral street art, or the idea of “sarjetar” as a way of non-institutional music-making in the streets.

Hence the shift of focus means approaching the urban creative space from the viewpoint of artistic periphery, even though in its interaction with the more established artistic expressions, often of German origin (comment: rethink this “German”).

The underprivileged and underrepresented artistic groups/communities in urban creative economy.