Vacant to Vibrant is a city-funded program that aims to revive San Francisco’s Economic Core (aka “Downtown”) by helping small businesses, entrepreneurs, artists, and cultural organizations activate vacant storefronts to revitalize the area and promote economic recovery.

For its first iteration, ffrancesca takes the form of an ephemeral art gallery. We invite artists and creatives to reflect on community building in a diverse city like San Francisco through the concepts of Kinship (afinidade/afinidad) and Otherness (alteridade/otredad). We like to consider these two concepts as conditions of relation: one that finds points of contact without denying the differences. We want to depart from the city’s core to look at and learn from the cultural expressions that come from places understood as peripheral, spatially and culturally.