Transformation

Video

Katarina Pavić: On Governance in Culture

Katarina Pavić, a cultural worker and activist from Zagreb, Croatia, talks about reshaping cultural organizations: What you do every day is a habit, and then your habits form your character, then your character informs the way you do things and the way you organize. When we talk about reshaping organizational systems — this is how we need to start. We need to start with what we are doing every day and how we are doing things every day and this is how we produce something that is called change or novelty.

Blog

The best we can. Re-establishing priorities for arts professionals in times of crisis

Arts professionals think that their work is important for society. Nevertheless, when it comes to defining or formulating this value in concrete terms, most of them fail to do so. Far from being able to establish the relevance of what they do for the people they aim to serve, they often seem to be totally unaware of what is going on around them and little informed on contemporary issues that affect their communities. Cuts in budgets for Culture, shrinking teams and an absurd demand for “doing more with less” have further intensified the disconnect between cultural organisations and society. The uncritical execution of repetitive tasks, therefore, has become a comfortable norm, where there seems to be little place for critical thinking, imagination, creativity and, ultimately, happiness. Can there be a way out from this swamp?

News

Workshop in Edinburgh: How can art radically imagine new forms of citizenship and empower us to act?

A university created and run by refugees > Social enterprises forged through vulnerable street children creating a circus > Historic injustices and everyday niggles aired and shared through joining a complaints choir > An energy cooperative developed from street parties > A nation-wide exchange economy fuelled through independent music festivals > Urban transport nightmares tackled through graffiti vigilantism > An inclusive cross-generational school fashioned collaboratively inside a recently re-opened nuclear exclusion zone ...

Blog

Art as a Tool for Social Transformation

From its capacity of generating changes in the collective imaginary, producing forms of critical thinking, inventing new ways of doing or proposing new formulas of social organization, art can be a practical tool for contributing to processes of social transformation. In this sense, when we talk about practices that are at the junction of art and social fabric, some of the most nutritious areas can be those of collaborative art, public art, practices close to activism, cultural mediation, art and education, or community culture. —— by Marina Urruticoechea (Sarean + Wikitoki + Karraskan)

Zeitgeist

Hope Through the Fog

McGonagle argues that a similar solution like that to the Covid-19 virus, to the other virus – the virus of the small state agenda which has infected societal provision and expectations – lies in a cultural turn towards reciprocal social relations, which can be articulated in a total art process that is not limited to rhetorical modes of production and consumption. The stakes could not be higher for individuals and communities right now in this immediate crisis but questions about what principles will inform the future are also necessary and important, to see hope through the fog.

Zeitgeist

The Art Institution as a Hole in the Ground

According to the author, art institutions mirror today’s dominant powers. Sarah Vanhee wants a plurality of institutions connected to different, heterogeneous forms of living and being. A longing for a feminization, decolonization and queering of the art institutions. Looking for art institutions that do politics instead of presenting art programmes about politics, that take care of the people who work there and engage with them, support them on the basis of equal dialogue and lend themselves as tools.

Method

Changing the Game: The RESHAPE Transition

This text is a first attempt to join the dots between the proposals, to draft the initial contours of a framework for understanding them. To understand the proposals, it can be useful to first have a brief look at the origins and the promise of RESHAPE, and how the project itself was redesigned and reshaped during an intensive process within the RESHAPE community. Secondly, we begin a reflection on how these proposals might contribute to responding to the current needs within the arts field. In very different ways, these proposals respond to increasing pressures concerning how the arts are organized, governed, and supported (or not).

Zeitgeist

Feminisation, Democracy, Labour: Towards a Socialised Cultural Institution

This essay is the programme document of a research project Porozumienie (Agreement) at the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, about the participatory transformation of the public theatre ‘Powszechny Theatre’ in Warsaw into a feminist cultural institution. A year of research and interviews with employees resulted in texts and practical steps, such as the establishment of an arts and programme board. The authors of the project were Agata Adamiecka-Sitek, Marta Keil, and Igor Stokfiszewski.

News

Online workshop: more than fifty people had joined ‘The Gamified Workshop Toolkit’

Flanders Arts Institute, Ettijahat - Independent Culture and Pogon - Zagrebački centar za nezavisnu kulturu i mlade organized an online session of testing ‘The Gamified Workshop Toolkit: Values of Solidarity’ prototype. The prototype was developed by Anikó Rácz, Doreen Toutikian, and Dorota Ogrodzka, within the frame of the Solidarity Economies trajectory group. It was especially designed for teams that are just beginning their collaboration, primarily in the field of arts and culture, but also in other relevant sectors.

Workshop

Value of art in social fabric: Remote Lisbon Workshop

The remote work within the RESHAPE group continues, this time in remote Lisbon. The group Value of Art in Social Fabric will work from 26 to 29 May on shaping their prototypes that will offer new approaches to this topic. They will work collectively on identifying their narrative on “reshaping the value of art in the social fabric”, in order to propose concrete, sustainable and realistic solutions for the art sector.

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