The publication of this book coincides with the 15th anniversary of Night of Culture, one of the most popular outdoor festivals in Lublin, Poland. The articles presented here are the result of several research projects undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of academicians and practitio- ners in years 2017–2020. During this period we investigated a range of phenomena that accompany the festival. Our field of study were insti- tutions and cultural practices, with “culture” understood as a dynamic, emergent, and highly complex process.
The point of departure for problems addressed here is a single event – Night of Culture. The festival has been taking place annually in Lublin’s city centre and the Old Town since 2009. From the beginning, its special character has been the result of a great accumulation of objects, events, and activities within the space of a few evening hours. The festival does not have an official opening, is completely free of charge, and does not require pre-booking. Its participants are free to choose their own itinerary and the way that they engage in the event. In spite of its wide recognition and a strong link to the branding policy of Lublin, Night of Culture’s primary focus is locality: it is organised by local cultural animators and artists, with local residents as the key target group.
Nevertheless, this book is not about the festival. We treat Night of Culture as a lens through which we investigate phenomena of a more general nature. Also, our aim was never to make an evaluation, although some of the articles may serve as a source of inspiration or solutions to concrete practical problems. All contributors to this book belonged to a team that, in the beginning, conducted the research projects mentioned above, and then worked together on this publication. Throughout these years, our team closely collaborated with the institution that hosts the festival – the Workshops of Culture. Our partnership begun with a formal research grant on the impact of festivals on Lublin’s socio-economic growth. Having completed the project, we decided to continue our investigations, but in a much more flexible manner that allowed for more experimentation and learning. In the end, the Workshops of Culture took the financial burden of publishing this book. Our close relationship with “practitioners” forced us to constantly address questions such as “why are you doing this?” and “what is it for?”, but did not affect the fact that we worked as an independent, impartial team of researchers using scientifically accepted methodologies and procedures.
The book is a collection of texts that apply a variety of concepts and research methods stemming from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and cognitive sciences. The authors apply various concepts and methodologies to seemingly similar topics. They offer different ways of conceptualising problems and employ specific research methods that allow them to address the issues in question. Some of the research techniques and sources of data are widespread in social sciences (e.g. paper questionnaires, individual interviews, desk research); others are much less commonplace (geospatial data, social media entries elicited in a special competition, drawings without any comments from their authors).
Consequently, the book is not a typical monograph that would present a fully explained, coherent stance towards a defined set of problems. “Culture”, “festival”, and “event”; “audience” “gathering”, and “crowd”; “city”, “space”, and “place” – these can be treated as the keywords for the whole publication. There are three reasons why we understand these concepts in different ways. First of all, our academic backgrounds are very different in terms of the traditions that we work with. In this respect, the book presents a number of strategies for researching culture and cultural practices. Second of all, not all authors have had a first-hand experience of participating in Night of Culture. From this point of view, this monograph offers an overview of applications of various types of data – from personal experience, through elicited information, to secondary sources created for reasons other than research. Third of all, some of the authors have long-standing careers; for others preparing a contribution to this book was the first encounter with academic work. Several contributions in this book are a result of close, regular collaboration in which the mentor’s authority was equally important as the possibility of undertaking independent investigations.
What do we see through Night of Culture?
The book is divided into three sections: “Form of the event: what is Night of Culture?”, “Audience”, and “Space”. Each text contains an English abstract; therefore, we provide only a short overview of the contributions.
The first section addresses two questions that are central for the whole book: what is Night of Culture and what makes it an interesting case for academic investigation. The opening article, entitled “Night of Culture as an event and a process. A look from the inside”, addresses five basic questions about the festival: by whom, where, when, why, and how it is organised. Aleksandra Kołtun, Anna Sędłak, and Joanna Wawiórka-Kamieniecka employ both the existing sources of information and autoethnographic data stemming from the experience of the last author – the festival’s director since 2015. Apart from offering a rich account of the festival’s “how-to”, the authors apply concepts from the field of knowledge studies. They take advantage of concepts of declarative and procedural knowledge, apply them to a concrete, empirical case, and conclude with some general remarks on how these two types of knowledge interrelate in organisational practice.
In “Who and what is Night of Culture for. Evolution of festival’s aims, formula, and organisation over the past 15 years”, Agnieszka Kolasa-Nowak expounds the aims of Night of Culture together with the organisational principles that arise from them. She manages to reconstruct a history of constant negotiations and modifications of the festival that begun as a certain “mass mobilisation” and, with time, became an institution. This is the only contribution to the book that offers insight into the festival’s history from the point of view of people involved in its creation. Importantly, at all times Kolasa-Nowak provides rich context for decisions made, thus offering insight into the process of negotiations between various actors: cultural animators and artists, city policy-makers and authorities, the festival audience, etc.
The last two articles in this section scrutinise the two essential elements of the festival: culture and night. Barbara Fatyga addresses the question of “How much culture is there in Night of Culture” and presents the conclusions from an extensive analysis covering the festival’s offer from the past 15 years. The article is an example of how to handle a large amount of disorderly information that needs to be organised into a set of data that allows for identifying meaningful patterns and drawing generalisable conclusions. Yet even more importantly, Fatyga treats these data-driven conclusions as a leeway towards more general deliberations concerning the consequences of homogenisation of culture or the ways in which we define the notion of contemporary culture.
Finally, Tatiana Triapitsyna makes a bold statement: that Night of Culture takes place during the night… only marginally. In “Tender is the night: the role of night in the festival experience of Night of Culture participants”, she discerns between night “in a traditional sense” and “a night of the metropolis”, arguing that the festival prolongs the usual hours of activity to a very little degree. At the same time, Triapitsyna presents evidence that night is crucial in the experience of festival participants as it prompts associations with magic and thus fosters the so-called “play of imagination”. Importantly, Triapitsyna’s deliberations are founded on the works of authors from the Russian-speaking world, whose conceptions and mode of argumentation are largely absent from the Western academic discourse.
The second section of the book addresses questions concerning the festival audience. Marcin Lipowski and Anna Sędłak (“The Audience of Night of Culture”) provide an overview of key information concerning the participants of Night of Culture, including their basic socio-demographic features, reasons for taking part in the event, as well as the ways in which people get involved in it. The authors refer to the results of two mixed-method research projects conducted in years 2017 and 2018. The research results show clearly that a significant part of Night of Culture audience are regulars that take part in it every year, sometimes for more than a dozen years. The festival is valued highest for its atmosphere, especially the transformations that it brings about to the public space of Lublin. At the same time, Night of Culture has an important socialising dimension; people generally like to wander around Lublin’s Old Town in a group of companions who share their observations and emotions with each other.
In the article entitled “Festive crowd at Night of Culture. Semantic field analysis of other participants”, Jacek Czerwiński reworks some traditional conceptions elaborated by Gabriel Tarde and other scholars studying collective behaviour. He also presents the results of his own data-driven investigations, conducted using the method of semantic field analysis. Czerwiński reconstructs how people perceive “other participants” of the event, namely, people whom they do not know and who are not the organisers of the festival. As a result, he examines two phenomena that at first seem paradoxical: that one can long for the crowd and avoid it at the same time, and that certain social norms of behaviour emerge even in such a carnivalesque, subversive context.
In “Night of Culture as a space for play: children in the role of companions”, Aleksandra Zalewska-Królak argues that during Night of Culture the usual, hierarchical relationship between children and adults can be transformed into one based on partnership. At the same time, Zalewska-Królak situates her deliberations in a more general context of childhood studies and discusses the reasons for the absence of children as research participants – both in the studies concerning Night of Culture and across social sciences as such.
The last text in this section unfolds the details of how participants experience the festival in terms derived from phenomenological sociology and cognitive sciences. Aleksandra Kołtun (“What can one learn from Night of Culture. The cognitive dimension of festival participation”) describes Night of Culture as a cognitive ecology in which our usual, ordinary ways of thinking and acting are exposed as something not obvious or inevitable. Festival participants experience the urban space in a manner that is radically different from what they know from their daily routines and taken for granted beliefs. As a result, the festival turns out to be an opportunity to learn – that the city is not a completely defined space, that it offers modes of acting that might have remained “unthinkable” a moment before, and that even small resources sometimes bring about major transformations.
The third section of the book covers topics related to the concept of space. Mariusz Piotrowski (“The space of Night of Culture”) elaborates a conceptual framework and the accompanying methods for identifying spatial patterns of ephemeral phenomena such as festivals. His theoretical concept consists of three emergent layers: space, landscape, and place, which allows for addressing issues related to accessibility, saturation with infrastructure related to culture, the process of developing the feeling of familiarity and “at-homeness”. In order to illustrate how these assumptions work with regard to empirical research, Piotrowski employs a sophisticated spatial analysis of the festival offer from years 2007‒2019.
In “Night of Culture as a City-Theatre” Bogna Kietlińska applies the conceptual framework of performance studies to investigations of the city and relationships between artists and their audiences. She treats Night of Culture as a spectacle, and the city as a combination of scenes which bring together the physical features of space with what is experientially significant. As a result, the festival is created by its audience and creates it at the same time, and operates as a liminal space in which ordinary urban scenes interpenetrate and clash with festival scenes.
The article written by Zbysław Muszyński (“The place of Night of Culture as a hybrid place. Analyses in the context of research into the concept of place”) offers one more perspective on conceptions of space. An extensive literature review covering recent debates around the so-called spatial turn reveals that the major issue in conceptualising place consists in failure to connect the subjective and objective dimension of the existence of place. Muszyński turns to cognitive sciences and formulates a “hybrid way of understanding place”, which conceptually integrates objective parameters of space and the mental states of an individual. Importantly, all these deliberations are illustrated with drawings made by Night of Culture participants. The author analyses their contents using methods based on analyses of visual narratives and treats them as evidence of individual experience related to place.
In “The ways of presenting Lublin during Night of Culture 2019. Conclusions from the analysis of captions and photos posted by Instagram users”, Mateusz Stępniak and Anastazja Szuła employ semantic field analysis and grounded theory methodology to discuss the issue presented in the title of the article. This text can be treated as an example of successful application of two research methods in the analysis of multimodal content generated by social media users. The authors conclude that Lublin’s transformation during the festival consists in, above all, becoming a place that is extra-ordinary, not from here and now, incredible.
The closing article in the third section of the book can be considered as a follow-up on the key results obtained by Stępniak and Szuła. In “Between utopia and reality. Heterotopia of Night of Culture”, Przemysław Głuchowski and Małgorzata Klimkowska apply the Foucauldian concept to reflect upon the nature of the festival and the influence it has over the space of the city and its residents. The authors argue that the festival manipulates certain parameters of space and time, as a result of which some norms become relaxed, while other emerge and guide the collective behaviour of people participating in the event. As a result, it turns out that Night of Culture not only functions as a certain type of heterotopia, but it also generates several other heterotopias.
The final chapter of the whole book is a transcript of the debate that took place in the middle of our work and brought together both authors of the articles and people engaged in the organisation of Night of Culture. The debate was an opportunity to voice numerous doubts, controversies, and issues of methodological and organisational nature that accompanied the work on this publication.
