Common understandings of creativity reduce it to a flash of insight or to a personal characteristic of a highly-gifted person. This paper develops an alternative way of understanding creativity departing from a series of interviews with local painters by conceptualizing creativity as a process of articulating and getting caught up in a “meshwork” of materials, places, spaces and social encounters. Using assemblage theoretical framework, my perspective examines how different elements (both human and non-human) are brought together in flows of connections. Looking at the art world this paper takes into account also the materiality of the creative process and inquiry into how the materiality of working materials (paint, coal, brushes etc.) and the materiality of the space affect and are affected in the creativity assemblage. As such, departing from an anthropocentric perspective on artistic creativity, that takes only in consideration the meanings attributed by people (especially the artist) to forms, social uses and trajectories of artistic objects.

There is a growing research interest in cultural spaces and their urban regeneration potential. Discussions about these spaces can be found in the literature under concepts such as: art spaces (Grodach, 2011), cultural spaces (Alexander, 2003), creative spaces (Becker et al, 2009), cultural laboratories, free spaces (Polleta, 1999), yet little research examines them from a dynamic perspective which integrates approaches from different disciplines. Through the methodological lens of bricolage and by mixing methods from mental geography, psychology and sociology, this study explores the alternative cultural spaces in terms of its pluralism, managing to identify a new conceptual framework, the fluxus space. Fluxus spaces are cultural spaces situated at the intersection of public-private, old-new, informal-formal, legal-illegal expressions, playing an important role in artistic development and in the urban and community regeneration processes.