Europos kultūros institucijos kaip glokalizmai: Fundação de Serralves ir Šiuolaikinio meno centro atvejai

The impact of the globalising cultural trends on diverse national cultures has become one of the central issues of recent sociological debates. Globalization is often seen as hegemonic; however, the complex local-global dialectics has created social phenomena that can not be analysed only in a global or a local perspective. The city becomes an interesting analysis stand point in the sense that it concentrates the main characteristics of late capitalism, but also becomes a privileged stage of intense and diversified cultural demonstrations, thus they can be consider a convergence point between the global and the local – a network’s node. Icons of an urban cultural identity, contemporary art galleries, as strong symbols of the city’s glocal features are rich contexts of analysis of the globalization trends. Therefore, in this paper designed as a social, political and economic analysis of the context in which contemporary art galleries are created, we interpret the specific incorporation of common global trends into the construction of glocalised projects. In this analysis, we use two case studies: the transformation of a private Art Deco Villa into the Fundação de Serralves, in Porto, and the renewal of the Palace of Exhibitions that used to celebrate the Soviet regime into the Contemporary Art Centre, in Vilnius. Although Serralves is a legal private organization, it is a public art institution. The exploration of the multiple layers of the private/public relations meaning is possible, in order to understand the extension in time and social scope of its patronage of contemporary art function. A different outline was made on the CAC analysis: from a Soviet art institution with the purpose of controlling and propaganda, to a gallery focused exclusively on what is new. This clear cut with the past produced several tensions – upstream with the artists and downstream with the audience. By combining the deterritorialisation tendency of globalization and the re-territorialisation of localization, these two European cultural institutions address the dialectic nature of the connection between global and local trends in the construction and reconstruction of contemporary urban environments – localized globalisms.