Abstract

While the « street corner society » is mostly masculine, women seek out common spaces : school gates, around-the-clock/24-hour surgeries/ medical practices/centres, social centres, and nowdays the garden. There is an artistic and political practice, that has been grafted onto this need, for the construction of waiting spaces where it is possible to breath together. In the major European cities « vacuoles » are being created on the initiative of artist-activists, places where the inhabitants of a deprived neighbourhood can pool their ideas and set down their dreams, making themselves available for the event. The collective construction of multiple languages, that of local migrations, is framed by a work of analysis and common effort, by the slow building up of a « plan of consistency », translocal and transnational