Infrastructuring togetherness: exploring eventification of community and advocacy in a European network of cultural centres

Despite the numerous cultural networks within and outside of European contexts of culture-led urban development as well as transnational cultural policy-making, in-depth analyses of such networks remain scarce. In light of this, the article introduces the network Trans Europe Halles (TEH, est. 1983) as an empirical case study that illustrates cultural grassroots organising across its 165+ members throughout Europe. TEH works both inward-oriented towards the building of a community, and outward-oriented via practices of network expansion, eventification and collaborative policy-making efforts. Sensitised through the different temporalities of “project time” and “infrastructure time”, as well as conceptual engagements with critical event studies, we identify and temporarily disentangle the intertwined practices of (1) infrastructuring a community and (2) infrastructuring cultural advocacy. Understanding the TEH network as a socio-material and continuously evolving, relational infrastructure, our infrastructural analysis offers a theorisation that helps to understand temporal concatenations in their local and contextual specificity.