Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how social constructions of artistic autonomy scale up to define an artistic neighborhood of Amman

Paper long abstract:

As the Amman neighborhood of Jabal al Luweibde became an "artistic neighborhood," residents began to speak of a "Weibde Bubble," describing the neighborhood as separate from the rest of the city. This condition of separateness, tied closely to the neighborhood's artistic character, opened the neighborhood as a space for artistic, social, and political experimentation. At the same time, the spatial separateness structured a geographical imaginary around the art scene which helped to shape artistic ideologies and action. In this paper, I analyze this separateness as a spatial manifestation of artistic autonomy. While autonomy is a property typically attributed to artworks (Kant, Schiller) or artists/art-worlds (Bourdieu), here, we see autonomy as a social construct which has been scaled up from artists and artworks to apply to an entire neighborhood. Such a spatial autonomy is not only an important development for the art scene, but is socially generative in ways that stretch into society at large.