Case Study: Creating a Profile - Reworking 'Community' at Footscray Community Arts Centre

Rimi Khan.

Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, Vol 7, pp.134-148.

2010

URL: https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.582411764231578

The recent history of Footscray Community Arts Centre, based in Melbourne, Australia, reveals a significant shift in focus: from its traditional emphasis on engaging with local 'community', to addressing the 'community' of the professional artsworld. In trying to lift its organisational profile, FCAC has reconstituted the sorts of community arts activities it undertakes - namely, by privileging 'artistic outcomes of excellence', and narrowing the sorts of 'community engagement' it facilitates. This is partially a response to arts policy changes in the last decade, but is also due to the problematic nature of community arts itself - particularly, the expansive nature of the term 'community', and the resultant need to limit the types of community arts activity the organisation oversees. These dual imperatives - to engage with the 'local community', and to build an organisational profile within the arts sector - situate FCAC in a difficult conceptual and practical space.