Archive for oktober, 2009

Four conference days filled with seminars, working group meetings, worksops, study visits and meetings in Barcelona just took place at the Encatc Annual Conference.

During the talk between Isabelle Schwartz from European Cultural Foundation, Angels Margarit from Angels Margarit Dance Company, and Angel Meastres from Transit the role of cultural managers were tossed and turned. What is the role of cultural managers? Is it only a role mainly having Artistic production on one side and management on the other? On other point put forward was that of representation within the EU-institutions and funding. The Artistic point of view is not put forward in an organized form, since the organization among Artists is quite week. The publishing house, recording companies, film industry are represented and have organisations that lobby for their interest, but not the Artists. That is more on individual level. There is an interesting balance between framework and independence, something Angel Meastres put forward, and where is the cultural manager? They are mainly emphasizing ideas and how to find money, not society and building infrastructre. Something to consider in educational programmes around Europe.

A visit at Can Xalant showed an Artistic collective, Transit, running residency-programmes, workshops and exhibitions. An old farming house, owned by the municipality, now embedded and surrounded by larger companies and industries. Their deal was quite unusual. The municipality set up a competetion to find who would get the possibility to run the building. Artistic groups sent in their proposals of activities and ideas. Transit won and had now built an infrastructure, programmes, activities and resiencies. Now it’s time to apply again, with a new application. Their time run out in December, and they will get the decision…in December. January 1 they are supposed to continue with programming if they get money, if not, they are supposed to leave the house with everything in it. Either step on the gas pedal or brake.

So, how do you plan a serious and sustainable organization under those conditions?

For the conference programme, look here. Nätverkstan took part in two presentations: 1) the working group meeting ”Creative Entrepreneurship and Education in Cultural Life”, download the pdf here: encatcwg_barcelona-oct09. , and 2) the dialogue on ”How to detect creativity potentials in the digital environment” together with Jordi Sellas i Ferrés at, among other things, RBA Audovisual. Download the presentation here: encatc09-presentation-oct-09_2.

Listen to a conversation on how some cultural organizations in USA cope with the economic crisis and how they have been affected.

At the exhibition hall Tensta Konsthall outside of Stockholm, the Australian Artist Tracey Moffatt is showing her series ”First Jobs” (2008).

It’s about those first jobs you have as a youngster, on your way out in life. As peeling pineapples, scrubbing floors, washing dishes, car parking…Now she is working as an Artist, which she describes as being ”jittery holiday”. You can get up when you want in the morning. But it’s also lonely. As she says: ”You have to come up with ideas and make them happen. No-one else is going to do it for you”. On the Tensta Konsthall website you can read how she describes ”First Jobs”, but perhaps more it gives a perspective on working life of an Artist.

Here she talks about another exhibition she was part of:  ”Burning down the House: Building Feminist Art Collection” showed at Brooklyn Museum in New Your this spring.

New IT-solutions as how to download music and film legally, how to create animated movies with your personal photos, upload videos and cut and add music to it, or streaming a video direct from your mobile to the web, are growing immensely fast. Innovative ideas on what you can do on internet are created and uploaded in a pace that is hard to follow. Is the cultural scene following? Who is taking the lead to explore new ways of communicating, showing, exhibiting, buying, networking with the Artistic scene and cultural entrepreneurs on Internet? What IT-services are needed for the Arts?

Read two articles in the Daily Svenska Dagbladet on Sunday Oct 4, ”Den nya IT-vågen” (”The new IT-wave”) and one about the newly produced book ”The Youtube Reader” (English) called ”Youtube liknar inget vi har varit med om” (free translation: Youtube doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen before).

Just look at these web-services, the twenty-five Swedish IT-companies mentioned in the article: Spotify, Voddler, Booli, Jaycut,  Videoplaza, Bambuser, Animasher, Agency9, Peeralism, Saplo, Textflow, Pixlr, Soundcloud, Xcerion, Burt, Twingly, Polar Rose, Bloggy, Fileride, Jalbum, Stixy, Momail, Laterthis, Squace, Dashnotes.

Cultural journals have probably never before gotten such media exposure as they have now, thanks to the Cultural Bill presented by the government last week. The Bill propose changes in funding and a new defenition that will severly curtail the number of cultural journals to only include those that write about the Art forms (in difference of today where they include topics like society, critical analysis, feminism etc). Yesterday several of the large dailies in Sweden published a declaration written by heads of cultural pages in the dailies and editors  of cultural journals stating that the state can never dictate the content in a journal and the importance of having a societybased cultural debate in Europe.

In the daily Göteborgs-Posten, the article looked like this. Read also a comment on Newsmill, written by Olav Fumarola Unsgaard (somtimes a writer on this site). Read the former Cultural Minister’s reply here. More articles in Dagens-Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Svenska Daglbadet, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, Expressen and Helsingborgs Dagblad. All these in Swedish.

For an English website on journals in Europe look at Eurozine, one of the representatives signing the call. A former post on this topic, you find here and here. And download the following document for information of the production support for journals in Sweden (in SEK): kulturtidskrifter-beviljade-produktionsstod-2009.