Archive för Cultural Journals

A grand literature conference with the theme Sufism and Peace has just been completed at the National Library in Islamabad, Pakistan. About 200 delegates from 35 countries participated. One of the largest delegations came from Sweden, thanks to the fact that Peter Curman last year received the Quaid-e-Azam Award, one of the highest honorary awards you can get in the country. He received the price of 16,000 euros for both his writing and for his work to allow literature to meet across borders. The conference had the aim to investigate whether the Sufi teachings, a spiritual view of the direction of Islam, can contribute to peace in the violence struck country. Sufism has also sought to be advanced by intellectuals in the West as a possible conciliatory force and the way to open dialogue between secular Western culture and Islam.

Sufism became popular in medieval Persia and the countries that today constitute Pakistan and Afghanistan, not least by poets as Rumi and Hafiz. They taught Islam in local languages, and preached a message of tolerance towards other faiths. Mainly, however, Sufism is a spiritual movement that focuses on achieving unity with God. Even today there are active Sufi orders across the Muslim world. Sufism is by no means irrelevant to understanding the subcontinent’s relationship with Islam. In one of the best lectures throughout the conference, Polish Jolanta Sierakowsky-Dyndo described the Sufi influence on the clan-based societies of Khorasan in the Middle Ages. It is expected that there then were about 800,000 active Sufis in the countries we now call Iran, Pakistan and India. .

The conference agreed on a declaration that said a multicultural society was a way to embody the ideals of Sufism. But discussions at the conference pointed in different directions. One of the closing speeches of the Swiss sociologist Patrick Haenni won great approval. He wanted to emphasize that a discussion of religious extremism must also take into account social factors and identified three contemporary phenomenons within the Muslim culture, which he said were at least as important as Sufism to promote dialogue: their own intellectual movement, with names like Samir Kassir and Edward Said, a moderate political Islam often inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, and finally the emergence of an individualistic and modern “post-Islamism” in the West.

The conference has been widely reported in Pakistani media, not least because all delegates were invited to the presidential palace, where both the education minister, himself practicing Dervish, President Asif Ali Zardari and Peter Curman gave speeches for the participants at the conference, parliamentarians and ambassadors from several countries, including Sweden’s ambassador Ulrika Sundberg..

Here is a link to a report on the conference in Swedish: retrogarde.org

Text by Carl Forsberg, Manager of Medieverkstäderna (Media Workshop) at Nätverkstan. Parts of the article was published in the daily Göteborgs-Posten last week.

It’s difficult to confirm an exact figure, some show about seven hundreds different cultural journals are produced in Sweden covering areas like Art, society, philosophy, feminism, environment, design, literature and much more. This wide flora of voices in the societal debate has been seen as an asset, even a vital condition, in Swedish debate and democracy. With the journals interest and knowledge in specific areas, and deep analysis combined with reflection, they are often the first to highlight processes, discussions, injustices, trends, and social issues. And the larger newspapers are soon to follow. Not that everything published is liked by everyone, but it’s an important voice, a vital piece in the democratic puzzle.

The situation for these journals is somewhat peculiar. 134 journals sent an application to The Swedish Arts Council last year, 103 printed cultural journals and 16 Internet based got a small state support for production. It’s a support designed to cover loss. Practically this means that to be obliged for this support you must show a minus on your account, an economic loss, each year. Not difficult at all. In fact, hardly any of these small journals have money enough to pay all the people involved. They are produced in a combination of voluntary and professional work. Nevertheless, this has for years held them in a tight economic grip. If you would make a small profit, you loose the support. So, there is no incentive to try to build a strong economy. Finally the Department of Culture is suggesting that this condition of loss is abolished from the support. It’s been quite contradictory in the dialogue with the journals, a new decision would aslo go more in line with the era where state and regional institutions talk about, and often require, external funding such as sponsorship or other solutions.

The Swedish Arts Council has during the last two years been vague as to how and if the production and development support will be changed due to proposed changes from the Government, especially due to changes proposed in last years Culture Bill. And it’s still a big cloud of uncertainty. We are now into the first quarter of an annual year and many, as for instance the Cultural Journal Workshops, don’t know if they will be able to continue their work or not. Plans made and activities have to wait for the decision that has not yet been taken.

A necessary step is distribution. Another area in limbo, where the Swedish Art Council is signaling this should not be of state responsibility anymore. With the small numbers of subscribers and small portion of sold numbers each month, a reality these journals face, they are not the most attractive pieces for a bookshop to keep on the shelves. You can argue for democracy or the important input these make on the debate climate in Sweden. If they don’t bring in money, they will not be put on the bookstore shelves. This suggests for a specific solution for distribution and marketing of small-scale journals, something that has been done. Nätverkstan has since 1998 held a support from the Swedish Art Council, that from 2005 grew to be quite substantial, to build up and offer distribution network, register solutions and marketing. Now the future is uncertain. For Nätverkstan it’s of course sad. It’s a core activity. Over the years a strong distribution network of 387 bookstores, museums, and other retailers around Sweden has been built. For the cultural journals it’s very serious. It will result in very few or no distribution channels. And what for? It can hardly be the money.

The budget post where cultural journals are found in the state budget is called “Culture, media, faiths and leisure” (my translation, in Swedish: budgetområde 17, Kultur, medier, trossamfund och fritid) and was last budget year 10.3 billion. Cultural journals got around 22 millions in production- and development support in 2009, which is 0,2% of the budget post. Distribution support was last year 1,550 million SEK, a disappearing small part of the same post.

Read about the consequences for the Cultural Journals if the distribution line is cut in the report newly published by Nätverkstan: konsekvenserna.pdf.

Read more posts on cultural journals, such as Cultural Journals in Sweden and “Time for culture” • The Swedish Culture Bill or at the debate at the site of Förening för Sveriges kulturtidskrifter (the Association for Swedish Cultural Journals).

The Culture Bill, Tid för Kultur (my translation: Time for Culture) can be downloaded here: a7e858d41.pdf.

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.

The well-visited book fair in Göteborg has just come to an end. The official number of visitors were 97.000, presentations in the programme were 2700, with around 2100 participating organizations, publishing houses and so forth. Next year they have selected Africa and African literature as the theme.

Nätverkstan had, as usual, a stand for the cultural journals in Sweden where you could read the journals or listen to presentations of editors. One of the main topics of discussions was the Cultural Bill presented by the Government during the week and the point on changes in funding and definitions of cultural journals. The myriad of journals in Sweden, shown in our stand at the fair, would most certainly be effected.

Read the article today in the daily Dagens Nyheter (in Swedish) about the bill, written by journalist Mikael Löfgren. Read a former post on the Cultural Bill here. Download the “Black list” of cultural journals presented by the journal Fronesis as a reaction on the Bill: adelsohn-liljeroths-svarta-lista (In Swedish).

Blogger Anna Winberg call the stand “Pretty in Pink” (In Swedish) and project manager Carl Forsberg reads a letter to our Royal Highness Princess Victoria (In Swedish).

The Nätverkstan project Kulturchock (Culture Chock) in cooperation with journals such as Geist, Glänta, OEI, Ord&Bild, Paletten, Site have been invited to The Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. The idea is to present Sveriges kulturtidskrifter (Swedish Cultural Journals) as an important infrastructure for contemporary Art in Sweden. In the Museum’s studio discussions and happenings where critical, literary and Artistsic practices meet, as they do n these journals.

First out was the Critical Run on Sept 10, a format created by the Danish-French Artist Thierry Geoffroy. Under the headline “Are critics critical?” invited guests discussed the topic while jogging from the Government office to the Modern Museum of Art in Stockholm. Look at the Facebook discussion (in Swedish) here.

During 4 days one of Europe’s most vibrant and intellectual vital networks met. Eurozine is a network of European cultural journals, linking up 70 partner journals and just as many associated magazines and institutions from nearly all European countries. Eurozine is also a netmagazine which publishes outstanding articles from its partner journals with additional translations into one of the major European languages. The theme this year was European histories. As described in the conference- reader:

Under the heading “European Histories”, this year’s Eurozine conference will explore the role of history and memory in forming new identities in a Europe in change.

Throughout Europe, history is ceasing to be something for historians alone. Instead, it is becoming both a public issue and an instrument of politics. In the West, this progression can be traced from the wilful amnesia of the postwar years, through the mission of the ‘68 generation to make the previous generation accountable for its crimes, to the obsession with history of the last two decades. In the East, the imposed history of the liberation has given way to the liberation of history. Nevertheless, highly different “commemorative cultures”have formed and the comfortable historical consensus long obtained within and among western European countries has been undermined by the eastern enlargement.

Europeans are still far from an all-embracing “grand narrative”, assuming this is worth striving for at all. But much would undoubtedly be gained by discussing the existing plurality of narratives in a shared space transcending national boundaries. The Vilnius meeting will provide the opportunity for such a debate.

Twenty years after 1989, the conference will also take stock of the dramatic developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, most former communist states in central and eastern Europe are members of the EU; others are waiting in line. But the transition from closed to open societies is far from over. Fierce debates on lustration and information surfacing from previously closed archives show that, today, 1989 represents not only an historic moment of liberation but also a political and social dilemma.

The discussions and panels this year where of highest intellectual level possible. The subjects where well chosen and sometimes very provocative and mind-bending. The speakers includes Timothy Snyder, Arne Ruth, Leonidas Donskis, Thorsten Schilling, Martin Simecka, Mircea Vasilescu, Irena Veisaite, Zinovy Zinik and Marci Shore. The Eurozine network is one of very few situations where east and west meet on equal level. We are trying to learn how a common Europe is possible and how we can create a real dialogue where we can speak on equal terms. We may not agree on the agenda, the topics or the war on Iraq- but without Eurozine this discussion never would have taken place. Best regards and very large Thank you to Kulturos Barai, Vilnius Capital of Culture 2009 and foremost the crew at the Eurozine office.

Links:
http://www.eurozine.com
A very interesting article by Timothy Snyder:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005-05-03-snyder-en.html

Written by Olav Unsgaard, Manager at Nätverkstan.

Art Villa Garikula is a contemporary Art center, placed in a village around one hour drive from Tbilisi. In the lack of infrastructure, Artist unions, and of space for Artistic work in the cities, Artists and curators try to fill this gap by taking initiatives and run projects. Many small projects start, to research, investigate to try to understand how to move in this new era, how to change.

The center is not a small project. It’s a big main building and a smaller one next to it, in constant need of renovation. A lot has been done already. There are bedrooms and studios, and a large garden to use for Artistic work, tenting or putting up exhibitions. And having parties. Art students and professional Artists come from the city to explore work forms and expressions, or for just relaxing. A new Georgian utopia is needed – Art Villa Garikula is where this new utopia will be formed, they tell us.

The visit to Georgia is part of the project EKAE 2009. People from Art, film, literature, publishing, cultural journals, education and crafts in Sweden and Georgia have met during a week in Tbilisi, having working meetings to form mutual project ideas within each area. The projects are planned to run during 2009-2010. Read more in posts May 12, May 11, May 9, and March 10.

Read also the article “Crunch time in the Southern Caucasus”, written by Ivan Sukhov, Journalist at the Moscow newspaper Vremya Novostei, published at the OpenDemocracy website.

The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) is a trade organization dedicated to supporting, nurturing and promoting independent retail bookselling in California. With over 500 members, including nearly 300 booksellers, the NCIBA has been an experienced provider of services for over two decades.

Hut Landon, Executive Director, walks us through the domains of - among others - George Lucas (passing by the Yoda-fountain) to their office in San Francisco. The association is led by a 15-person Bord of Directors, and their main task is to increase the sales for independent bookshops in northern California.

The competition from Internet selling has led to the fact that independent bookshops must be much more proactive in their way of marketing themselves. Localism has become a watchword; people must become aware of the importance of supporting their community stores, if they want a  lively and prosperous neighbourhood. To explain this to the customers, Landon and his staff has made the poster “Eight great reasons to shop at locally-owned businesses” (http://www.nciba.com/dls/8-great-reasons.pdf), which is now available to all NCIBA-members.

Apart from this, the association also arranges the NCIBA Trade how, produces the Holiday Showcase (yearly catalogue which features new titles), sets together workshops with topics of concern to the members and prints a weekly regional bestseller list.

Landon makes it clear that NCIBA does not regard the big chains, like Borders and Barnes & Noble, as competition. Independent booksellers have something that the big stores may lack: great book-knowledge, devotion and close relations with their customers. Amazon though, constitutes a big threat. The future will tell if David will stand a chance against Goliath, in Californa as well as in Sweden.

Written by Karin Lundgren and Marie Johansson, Managers at Natverkstan.

The heroes survived. They were supposed to be killed after the film was made, but the film maker just couldn’t. The animated dolls were characters, personalities, so how could you kill them? Instead he hid them. After each movie he hid them in his house with the risk of getting caught. Intellectual property rights in the 70s, the government was afraid that the dolls would be used in another movie and they would have troubles with angry doll makers who wouldn’t get paid. Now we are able to watch them in a small, one-room museum. Beautiful hand-made dolls, made in Russia in the 70s for animated film made in Georgia. The most known is Bombora, a character who just wanted to go to school and in his frustration for not being able to sets fire on things. Now this character is posing over the entrance in the newly made amusement park at Tatsminda.

Wato Tsereleti, a well-known curator and Artist is describing the contemporary Art scene for us on a café. A major problem, many Artist tell us is space and funding. There is no space for Art or large events. In October the conference Artisterium is taking place, and a difficult part has been to find where to have it. A wonder, really, since Tbilisi is still very much a city in transition and there are many empty spaces. Wato Tsereleti has finally been able to find a locality, and the idea is to restore it into an Art center.

Many meetings has been taking place among visual Artists and Art education, between colleagues in the literature and publishing scene in Sweden and Georgia, as well as performance and film. Bakur Sulakauri Publishing is the biggest publishing house in Georgia, publishing around 200 books every year. They are meeting with colleagues at the publishing house Tranan in Sweden, together with writers, to discuss on how they can work together. The idea is that each Art form will come up with project ideas for future cooperation and exchange.

And as we walk to all these meetings, have  discussions between colleagues in the Art world, we pass the cells at Rustaveli Avenue and get reminded of the situation in this country. What is it we see in the streets? At Rustaveli, near the Parliament and Freedom Square the streets are filled with cells, small plastic covered boxes where people stay all day, all night in protest of the government. It’s difficult to analyse or understand what the cells stand for. Is it an organized protest of a well defined opposition? Or a more a protest of angry inhabitants showing their miscontent of the president? Or is it a show put forward by a few people with economic resources wanting to overthrow the president and take power? Perhaps it’s an Art show, or an installation? We get different versions, different stories. But it is clear that many people are very tired of the situation, of the threats of war, and long for coming back to a normal situation.

The visit is part of the project EKAE 2009, run by Natverkstan and financed by the Swedish Institute.

Michael Tucker, president of Independent Booksellers, Books Inc., really believes that there is a future even for the smaller, independent bookstores. That is if they are willing and capable of adjusting to the fast changing conditions of today.

The reason for going to San Francisco, when Svensk Bokhandel decided to arrange a trip for Swedish booksellers, is that this area has met up the challenge from the Internet bookshopping. Books Inc., with 10 stores and more that 200 employees, serves as a shining example that independent bookselling can not only survive, but also prosper – even if they “must dance among the elephants”. However, the elephants set the rules and the best you can do is being as flexible and innovative as possible.

Kitty Clark, manager at Books Inc., Vann Ness Ave., lets us in on her recipe for creating a successful bookstore: Focus on customer service – by engaged and trusted employees – make sure that the interior and selection appeal to your clientele, arrange author events, book clubs, book launch parties, seminars led by writers etc etc.

During our tour to four of Tuckers’s stores we could see exactly what she ment; they were all Books Inc. shops, but completely different. Neither orientation, nor design, looked the same in any of the places. It’s all about fitting into the context. Tucker also stressed the importence of events. Even if you have the most amazing store, you can not be sure that the books alone will stand the competition from the Internet commerce. You need something that makes you special, something the digital world lack. Above all, that’s eye to eye contact and interaction.

Can these advice be applicated to the Swedish independent book stores? Surely, the conditions are in many ways quite different, but here’s defenitely every reason to be inspired by the Book Inc., and the San Francicso way of finding ways to reinvent the traditional book shop.

Written by KarinLundgren and Marie Johansson, Managers at Natverkstan.

“Meeting can sometimes be more dramatic than showing a Bergman-movie.”

We are at the Swedish Embassy in Georgia, Tbilisi, talking about the project Exchange of Knowledge and Experience (EKAE) 2009 just starting in Tbilisi. Johan Öberg, from Faculty of Art at Göteborg University, describes the importance of combining working with events with meetings, working with processes is a working method for the project EKAE 2009. Today, Saturday, four intense working days start where a delegation of thirteen people from literature, Art, Art faculty at the Göteborg University, publishing houses, and film in Sweden has travelled to Tbilisi to meet colleagues within these areas to discuss future exchange and a possible event in Sweden 2009–2010.

A pilot group travelled to Tbilisi to prepare and met with visual Artists, textile Artists, Theatre and Film Instute at the Tbilisi University, publishing houses. Beyond the geopolitical situation and the internal wrestling in Georgia, cultural practitioners meet and continue their work over boarders. We listen to the textile Artist, Nino Kipshidze, working with the new flow of immigrants from South Ossetia in Gori, visual Artist Anna Riaboshenko from the network Tram, planning projects with the neoghbouring countries and North Caucasus to raise the status of Artists, and Levan Khetaguri at the Film and Theatre Institute on educating young filmers.

The project is run by Nätverkstan and financed by the Swedish Institute. More posts will be put up on this blog as the project continues. The project is a continuation of EKAE 2004, read more here.

One of the more interesting suggestions in the new report on Swedish Cultural Policy put forward by the Committee of Inquiry on Cultural Policy is what is called cultural policy as aspect policy. With this it’s stated that cultural policy should interact with societal issues like education, business, regional development, health and environment.

”We understand cultural policy as an aspect of all policy areas”. The intention is that ”perspective, creative talent, knowledge and insights that the authorities, institutions and practitioners within the cultural field hold can be important for societal development”. Quite rightly, it’s pointed out that this is not new, but the Committee believes that the development needs to ”accelerate and accentuate”.

To the extent it has been noticed, the suggestion has been met with positive response. Hopes have been put forward that the issues within the cultural field will be treated as issues within the environmental field. Today all public activities and all political decisions should be saturated with environmental awareness.

It sounds fantastic, but is it realistic? From what position does culture invite for interaction? And what sort of societal development is addressed?

A better comparison is perhaps done with the aid policy? It’s an area of policy that has been equally questioned and debated as cultural policy. It’s an area as exposed to cyclical changes and ideologies.

In 2003 the Parliament adopted Sweden’s new Policy for Global Development (PGU). The new development policy should include ”both an effective aid of high quality and coherence that includes all policy areas”. Hopes were high. But what happened? During the governance of the Allians parties, the results have had a reverse PGU, where all other policy areas impoverish aid and its budget: Refugee camps, dept depreciation, depreciation of costs for Swedish embassies.

1998, the same year as the Region Västra Götaland was formed; Göteborg formulated its Strategy for Cultural Policy, the so-called version 1.0. One of the main tracks was that culture should ”permeate all policy areas”. Now, around eleven years later we can ask: Is this what happened? Or did culture become an aid-assistant for health, regional development, and integration?

There are many good reasons for the aspect policy that the Committee is looking at. Culture can and should contribute to societal development. But if small policy areas like culture will be able to play such a central role, its integrity as to be ensured. Then you have to make sure that cultural policy is neither invaded, nor dissolved in other policy areas.

Written by Karin Dalborg, Manager of Kulturverkstan, Education in Project Management within culture, run by Nätverkstan. The article was published at the Internet Journal Alba on March 9, 2009. For the Swedish original, have a look at here.

Today Nätverkstan stock and distribute cultural journals. In recent years we have also received inquiries by a number of publishers to be able to offer this service also to books as well as journals. After some research we came in contact with Chris Anderson’s book “The long tail”. Book distribution today, in Sweden and elsewhere, is based on the assumption that dealers sell many copies of a book, the hits, while the smaller publishers’ titles are difficult to find. Stocks are expensive; it is costly to be included in the large networks of book distribution, affecting the availability of the more uncommon titles. The same applies to old issues of journals that have long timelines and worth reading years later. The long tail is based on the economy in even small and odd titles if you find new solutions for these to be distributed. Nätverkstan wrote an application to the Framtidens kultur foundation gratifying enough granted. Now the project is on the run with Olav Fumarola Unsgaard as projectmanager. Operations are planned to become an integral part of Nätek whith mainly Camilla Anemyr and Karin Lundgren working on the project. To our help, we also have David Karlsson.

In the spring we will offer journals a model and a specification for how they should do to be sold on internet bookstores. There have been a number of practical and procedural obstacles in the way of this but we hope that all will soon be allayed. In the spring we will also build a system and a warehouse where the publishers are to be included. The activities that we intend to build will be focused on internet bookstores requirements of speed and good logistics. This ensures that we unfortunately see a development where most narrow titles not even enter the large booksellers. We also intend to work up a partnership with one of the main print on demand providers to offer both physical and digital storage.

This activity is against the micro, small and medium-sized publishers and cultural journals. Please contact olav.unsgaard @ natverkstan.net to learn more about the project.

Written by Olav Fumarola Unsgaard

Göran Dahlberg, editor of the cultural journal Glänta, gives his perspective on topics widely discussed in Europe today. How do you keep high quality in your work in long-term perspectives? How do creative industries and artistic practice combine – or do they at all?

What inspires you?

The possibility of putting things together in other ways than they usually are. Encouraging writers and artists to work with issues that inspires them. Inspiring inspiration. And in that way produce momentarily new connections between issues and between people.

What do Glänta do to keep high quality and creativity over the fifteen years it has existed?

We are continuously working with different kinds of journal concepts: focus based, conceptually generated, and plain mixes. So we change the way we work and think continuosly, not only by changing the approach to different issues of the journal, but also by arranging seminars and  parties, publishing books and works that mould public opinion. Everyone involved in all these activities is also working with other things at the same time. And we all enjoy each others company.

In what ways do the talks of creative industries affect artistic practice in positive and negative ways?

I do not think that creative industries is a relevant term. Which are the creative and the non-creative industries? Are we talking about industries as such, or the people involved? By calling your organization a creative industry you are probably trying to convince someone that what you are doing is good for society, that you are creating something. I suppose all industries are trying to be creative in order to invent new products and make profit. Those who succeed are apparently creative, like for instance the arms industry.
The postive aspects of introducing this term, creative industries, is that it widens the perspective (even though it, as mentioned earlier, might be too wide) and makes the too respectful use of the term ”Culture” less frequent.

How do artistic integrity and entrepreneurship combine, do you think?

Calling yourself and your fellow cultural workers entrepreneurs is another way of trying to get respect for what you are doing from the more powerful sectors of society. And it might work, and might not. I am sceptical. In any case the risks are high that the economical, numerical, measurements will be the only ones left.
Earlier contributions on this website of Glänta is“Humoristic Glänta” and “Culture sponsor businesses”.

Should libraries be run as entreprises? And what does it mean for library services if they do? On a conference arranged by Axiell Library Group at Dieselverkstan in Stockholm, librarians from Sweden, Finland and UK have spent the past two days turning and tossing these questions. Examples of libraries that are run with a more entrepreneurial style, as Dieselverkstan in Stockholm, was put forward, as well as examples from London (UK) where changes of libraries has been on the agenda for some time. The goal is genereous opening hours, more visitors and to get people to loan more books.

Perhaps the most interesting and challenging work was done by the Library Manager, Rebekka Pilppula, from Joensuu City Library in Finland. Joensuu is a small region on the border to Russia in North Karelia, with only a about a hundred thousand inhabitants. They are facing a decline in inhabitants, young people move out, the staying inhabitans are just getting older, and unemployment rates are high and growing. The situation for the library was, thus, difficult and they have had a challenge in motivating politicians, renew, and find new ways of being relevant to the inhabitants. They did an amazing job in turning the situation for the library into a positive trend.

Nätverkstan held a contribution to the conference, on the topic “The interaction between culture and entrepreneurship”. The power point is found here: CultureEntrepreneur081107.pdf, the script can be downloaded here:Library Conference081107.pdf.

The cultural field knows what it feels like to be without money. And to have to worry about having a job or not. Spend days working with an “ordinary” job, to be able to do the artistic work on nights or weekends. Or spending hours looking for money, filling in applications, and perhaps turning to the state for support. The business world have been there with the answers on hand, willing to support with sponsorship and know-how. Now they are in trouble.

After weeks of financial crisis, with the breakdown of the economic system, and rescue-packages from governements in US and Europe (where the states will go in with money to save it all), the cultural journal and publishing house Glänta reaches out a hand to help the business world with know-how and experience. Read their advice (in Swedish) at Glänta’s webpage. As soon as an English translation is there, we will put it on the webpage.

Read also our former contribution on Glänta here.

The new number of the philosophic Journal and publishing house Glänta is a proof of creativity, future-looking and humour in a pleasant combination. The new issue of the journal is a Future Encyklopedia of new words in the Swedish language. What words will be needed in the future? What concepts will be relevant? Over a hundred authors, journalists, artists, researchers, philosophers have contributed to build this future of words. Reading it is a humouristic travel of words used, but still not in use in any encyklopedia, words that don’t exist and made-up words that might be used in the future.

Later on, on this website, we will get answers from the editor Göran Dahlberg on  questions like: What inspires you? What do Glänta do to keep high quality and creativity over the fifteen year it has existed? In what ways do the talks of creative industries affect artistic practice in positive and negative ways? How do artistic integrity and entrepreneurship combine, do you think?

So, more to come! Also get a glimpse of the Swedish literary scen, read the article from Glänta editorial staff on  Literary perspectives: Sweden at Eurozine. And have a look at Glänta on Facebook.

How do world cultures relate to the multifaceted process that we call globalization? Can we achieve greater knowledge and awareness of these issues in our own activities through interdisciplinary thinking and intercultural cooperation? In what way does globalization influence national cultural policy?

These were issued discussed at an interesting seminar with the titel “How big is your world? Cultural Policy and Globalization” a at the Museum of World Culture in Göteborg, Sweden, on April 10th. The seminar was based on the project The Cultures and Globalisation Series, which has resulted in impressive first and second volumes of “Conflict and Tensions” and coming “Cultural Economy“. Several speakers were invited such as Yudhishthir Raj Isar from the American University of Paris; Stefan Jonsson, writer and journalist in Sweden; Mikael Franzén, a Swedish political economist; Chris Waterman from UCLA School of the Arts in Los Angeles; Zala Volcic from the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at University of Queensland and several others.

The first and second volume of “Conflict and Tensions” and some information of the publication is found at the following website: www.princeclausfund.org/en/c_and_d/policy/princeclausfundpublicationconflictandtensions.shtml

In the European net magazine Eurozine you can read a very interesting article by the sociologist and freelance writer Klaus Ronneberger:

“Interns, temporary agency workers, people on job creation schemes, and pseudo-freelances make up the vast reserve army of workers in precarious employment. For the majority, standards such as productivity or flexibility have become second nature. In this respect, they are the avant-garde of post-Fordism, constantly opening up new avenues of self-exploitation.”

It was written a bout a year ago but when I read the last report from the Swedish Public Employment Service Cultural department it came back to me. We are closely approaching the end of an era. If you work in the cultural field you must be a freelancer or a self employed. Some statistics:

From Sweden:
In the cultural field the self-employed staff is increasing by 10-15 % every year (p 6-8). All of the growth within this sector is with and by self-employed and freelances.

From Germany (From Ronneberger):
In the 1980s over 80 per cent of musicians had permanent jobs, but within twenty years this proportion had dropped to 54 per cent. The number of actors with full-time jobs dropped from 76 per cent to 58 per cent during the same period.

The trend is clear. When I grew up I will be self-employed or a freelancer. Is that a problem? Well If you are a liberal and believe in choices this is a problem. If an entire sector is filled with projects run by self-employed each and every organisation will lose its memory. Further on will there be problems if the University and other educational institutions don’t provide the skills necessary for the workforce they educate. In this era new skills are needed:

•  Mobility
•  Networking
•  Competence for organising your own work processes
•  Strategic marketing of Yourself as a brand
•  Relational skills and social competence necessary for the “I- company” to stay on the market

We run an education, http://kulturverkstan.net/information_in_english, which is in the middle of this situation. We are small, quite new and unhierarchical. Do we like this situation? Well, it is much like the Greenhouseeffect. In some way it is contested, i.e. does it really exist? But if you have the feeling that the weather becomes worse and worse it might very well be so. The political changes the last 30 years has put us in this situation. The end of the Keynesian era, globalisation, the neoliberal revolution and the postpolitical dilemma are all true facts. It has changed the working market forever. Of course are there both pro’s and con’s. It has in some ways increased the possibilities for social mobility class wise. On the negative side: How are people supposed to pursue long-term goals if they constantly have to re-organise their lives and re-orient themselves?

Or to put it in an other way – We must learn to understand the dialectics of the postfordist society. We as an education must be in the forefront of this understanding. Otherwise will we loose both ourselves, but more importantly the future of our students.

The title of this text is an adaptation from the Swedish painter Peter Tillbergs ”Blir du lönsam, lille vän?”. This painting is in many ways the best description of the school politics of the fordist society. A remake of today would describe a single individual in the classroom. The face will surely look the same but today the collective is gone.

Further reading:
Klaus Ronnebergers text in Eurozine: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-26-ronneberger-en.html
The long-term report from the Swedish Public Employment Service Cultural department (in Swedish): http://www.arbetsformedlingen.se/go.aspx?c=220

Peter Tillbergs painting is available to buy as a poster from Moderna Museet in Stockholm:
http://www.modernamuseet.se/v4/templates/template3.asp?id=2533