Archive för International

Jan Inge Reilstad was together with artist Jörgen Svensson curating the art project Neighbourhood secrets during Stavanger European Capital of Culture in 2008. In the project eight artists from different parts of the world were invited to be in dialogue with Stavanger and Sandnes over a period of twenty months. The results were eight very different art projects as intervention in public space and part of city development.

Using art in city development raises questions of the role of the artist. What is your role as an artist? Can the result of a social process be called art? Jeanne Van Heeswijk, one of the artists in the project, was matched to work with Stavanger Hospital. They did a TV-soap, directed and performed by the staff at the hospital. The artist’s role was mainly to role the wheel chairs, taking care of ad hoc practical matters.

Nicholas Bourriaud puts forward in his essay Ustabile Forbindelser (Unstable Relations) in the book describing the Stavanger projects, a change in this relational and social art. A change that was set to the specific date 9/11. After the attack on the twin towers, he reasons that the art went from relational to more radical.

Within the EU, the discussions are going warm on how to make cities and regions more creative. In the Green Paper on the potential of the cultural and creative industries put forward this spring, ideas and incentives are put forward on how to do. One suggestion is: Read this book.

“Nabologashemmeligheter. Kunsten som byprosess ” (forlagetpress.no), edited by Jan Inge Reilstad. Look into Koro, Public Art in Norway. And for more ideas on city development and art look here.

On April 27 2010, the EU Commission launched a Green Paper on how to unlock the potential in the cultural and creative industries. The twenty pages long paper build on former studies of the economic importance as well as job creating within these industries, and suggests approaches, incentives, and pose retoric questions as of how to unlock the potential that they found.

The European network Encatc has, together with Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths University of London and Nätverkstan in Göteborg, prepared a response. Download it here:encatc-response-to-eu-green-paper .

Read this former post from the European Forum of Cultural Industries in Barcelona on March 29-30 2010.

She absorbs the room by her mere presence. As she walk up the stage to sit down on her chair, an excited murmur goes through the room. It’s evident that many have read and highly respect the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the most prominent thinkers within the research field of postcolonial theory. It’s merely impossible to refer to her talk with John Hutnyk, Professor in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University. She combines stories from her past and present with well-thought theories and a deep knowledge and concern for society and societal processes.

Göteborg is at the moment full of researchers, thinkers, professors and artists from all the world. Everyday an interesting talk is going on, the coming weekend will be full of music events with musicians travelling to Göteborg to perform. The event is part of the Clandestino Festival. The talks part of the cooperation Clandestino Talks:: Border Reverb, the last being a cooperation between Clandestino Festival in Göteborg, Goldsmiths University in London and Interarts in Berlin.

The festival is run by Bwana Club, a group of cultural producers, djs, and authors who through different forms like seminars, exhibitions, and actions aim to work across borders and with specific aim of democracy in the globalized world.

Below a talk by Spivak at University of California, Santa Barbara found on youtube.

The incubator Centre Dansaert Centrum, Creative Business Centre, is placed in the central Flemish part of Brussels that has become very hip and popular. A few years ago the area was run down and a place many avoided. And we know the story.

Artists moved in, gradually the status of the area grew. Today it has been renovated with apartments and shopping area. It has kept the small-scale feeling and in every corner and street you find them; the energetic people designing clothes, selling craft, running second hand stores, hat designers, architects, coffee shops and others.

For Centre Dansaert Centrum it was an attractive place to have an incubator. It’s an attractive spot, but too expensive for newly started initiatives. In the old storage building with origins back to 1870s, offices and space were created to host small and newly started companies. Today they have around fifty entrepreneurs in the building.

To get a place you introduce your project or idea to Fabien Lambert. You apply on an already existing idea or project. You pay one set amount per month and everything is included: Rent, advice and support on business plan and development, electricity and other related costs. There are eight incubators in the region, financed publicly by Ville de Bruxelles and Region Bruxelles-Capitale and of course the competition between the incubators and funding is there.

Two enthusiastic entrepreneurs and one gallerist meet us; one musician running the music company Cypres; one of the owners, Benoît Vancauwenbergh, of a fairly new communication agency 6+1; and the man behind the small gallery specialized on African artists, Nomad Gallery.

The visit was part of a joint meeting between Eurocities and Encatc in Brussels 1-2 of June 2010. Read about other incubators under the category “Incubators” on this site.

Today’s news of the Israeli attack on the humanitarian flotilla, Ship to Gaza, on international waters is a terrible state of fact in the world since 9/11, where everyone of us at any time can be accused of being terrorists.

Ship to Gaza is a humanitarian project and a grass-roots initiative to send supplies of building material and medical equipment to the people of Gaza. It’s a peaceful action from people-to-people to help people in need. Engaged in Ship to Gaza, and now on the ships, are parliamentarians, professors, artists, journalists, film makers, and many others.

The news are now spreading of nineteen people dead and several injured in the Israeli Military attack. An attack on peaceful demonstrators in peace time and on international waters.

Words are not enough to express the despair this creates.

Wagner is said to have stated that if everything is destroyed, the nation clinging on to art will survive. A nation ignoring it’s art ends being a nation.

Arvind Lodaya’s thoughts of cultural innovation and democratizing culture seem to begin with the same standing point. Culture, art, innovation is done in everyday life among ordinary people – i e all of us. Without the social capital – all those things that count for most in the daily lives of people (to use one of the definitions put forward) – we will be poorer. And we seemed to have lost track of this.

Civil society is mentioned in every policy document now-a-days, from local, regional, and state level in Sweden to EU. We have to cooperate with civil society, we are told. Definitions vary and no-one seem to fully understand what it means. Another fact is that policy documents rarely reach ordinary people, Arvind Lodaya argues. “Temples of Culture” are built and nurtured; artistic and cultural institutions whose existence only gather a few initiated and seem to exclude others. It’s dilemma not only of policy makers and politicians who put a lot of money into sustaining our cultural institutions. It’s something  also pursued by artists themselves, artistic universities, and cultural and art organizations.

Cultural Innovation is about art and culture found in our ordinary lives, is the message of Arvind Lodaya. This is where the driving force for cultural change takes form. The Indian context where he takes his staning point is also like a melting pot of cultures, languages, and people. Small-scale cultural entrepreneurs are found in every corner in the urban India; tailors, fabric producers, crafts, design, game, IT-experts, writers and so forth. In Europe cultural entrepreneurs are also small-scale, although working in a different fashion and structure. It’s in this small-scale environment innovation and new ideas start growing. How can cultural institutions facilitate everyday cultural innovation and what does the interface between an institution and social capital look like? What could policy makers do to support innovation within culture?

Arvind Lodaya’s answer is clear: Innovation needs to be nurtured rather than strangled. One way is to stop reducing people to only being customers and from policy level regarding them as much more complex than this.

See the slideshow of Arvind Lodaya here. A film of the seminar will be available on Internet soon. The seminar was held in cooperation between School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Region Västra Götaland, Encatc and Nätverkstan on May 24 2010. More on Arvind Lodaya can be found here and under cateogory “India” on this site.

As part of the project Linking Initiatives, a project between Region Västra Götaland and Karnataka, Arvind Lodaya from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore will be a visiting scholar for one and a half month in West Sweden. His main project is to look into the notion of Cultural Innovation and explore this further with partners from different areas. Due to this a seminar is held on May 27th. Read Arvind Lodaya’s discussion note here: arvindlodaya_discussionnote.pdf.

School of Film Directing at University of Gothenburg, and has just come back from another visit in Bangalore to continue and be a partner of the start of a Film School in Bangalore for film directing and artistic film making. Also this is part of Linking Initiatives. Read about the results here: FH/Bangalore201005.pdf.

Read more under the category “India” or the tag “Bangalore”.

Shiva Subramanian is a cultural entrepreneur. He has a business degree, which he doesn’t use, he says: “That’s why it works”. His view is that businesses put up so many barriers, so finally you can’t be human.

He has set up a row of different small companies and run different ideas and initiatives. His idea is to just get going, build on a social network and “no paperwork!” He owns the Sona Towers on Millers Road in Bangalore, and has put up a space on the fifth floor for other entrepreneurs such as internetradio, an architect, a lawyer, graphic designer. What is the key factor for success we ask? The informal setup, his social network and culture.

“This wouldn’t work if it wasn’t within the art.”

Indian Institute of Management, along Bannerghatta Road within a green garden domain, would love an entrepreneur like the ones on fifth floor. On the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning the idea is to work within three areas: Research, teaching and training entrepreneurs, and incubator. In the incubator they look for unique and scalable ideas and a passionate team. During “punchwhole meetings” they judge and try to punchwhole the idea and see how the entrepreneur respond to this. One challenge is to get the person focussed on the idea; a start-up work seventy percent with other things and not with the idea.

Alternative Law Forum is a collective of lawyers starting in 2000 with the idea that there is a need for an alternative practice of law concerning social and economic injustice. They have run several campaigns for sexual, women and civil rights and questions like: How do minorities get access to their rights?. The eleven laywers connected to ALF cover a large variety of issues, do research, campaigns and publish articles.

Running a perfume business these days is hard. Globalization has changed the market completely, and being a smaller business you just can’t compete with the large ones. The international connection is asked for by customers who would like to order a new perfume, and for a small business it’s just not possible. They have instead accepted to be in the second layer, Mr Vijayakumar explains, when he with love for his profession explains how it works.

The perfumery is one part of what they do at Vijayakumar Farm. The farm is named after the family name, where they have over the past few years planted over 250 species of plants and trees; endangered species, the sainted trees, spices and other things. One part is the breeding of a rare cow, which we are told, is both intelligent and has feelings. We also get to see a wonderful dance performance by Raadha Kalpa and the story behind traditional dance.

One sentence stay in your mind, said by one of the entrepreneurs: “In India if you don’t succeed you die.”

The visit is part of the exchange program Linking Initiatives, an initiative between Region Västra Götaland and Karnataka in India. Read more under tag “Bangalore” or category “India”.

Another buzzword in Europe is “Innovation”. A word making the eyes of policy makers, economists and others shine with expectation. Last year in Europe was dedicated to the year of Creativity and Innovation and the creativity around how to get the attention from the EU Commission was interesting to follow.

As was said on the Forum of Cultural Industries in Barcelona recently, cultural and creative industries are still high on the priority list among cultural ministers in Europe. And with this also the question of how you could foster creativity and innovation within art and culture.  KEA European Affairs was commissioned last year by EU to do a study showing with facts how culture in itself had an impact on creativity.  Interesting, but is culture and art necessary always creative? And for the concept of innovation we are often stuck with the classical understanding of the word; as an invention you get patented, often found within medicine and technique. Structures are built to support and foster creative ideas within these fields, often together with technical Universities.

How does that apply on cultural products and artistic expressions? Very few of these can be patented. What would be innovation in a cultural and artistic context? What is cultural innovation? Where is the driving force for (cultural) change in society? How does cultural innovation happen?

On a meeting last week with one of the finance and support structures for SME’s put up by the Swedish state, two things were evident. They had never given finance support to cultural entrepreneurs as they could remember, and on a discussion on innovative ideas, art and culture was not on the agenda.

In May and June, Region Västra Götaland will host Arvind Lodaya, Senior Faculty and Dean, Research at Sristhi School of Art, Design and Tecnology, and an artist from Bangalore (India) as a visiting Professor. His working place will be Nätverkstan and his main focus is cultural innovation. Two seminars will be held in Göteborg to explore the topic together with participants.

Download the invitation here: Cultural_Innovation.pdf . You can also download a discussion paper by Mr Arvind Lodaya here: arvindlodaya_discussionnote.pdf. More can be read of Arvind Lodaya and Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology here. and here The residence is part of the programme Linking Initiatives, a cooperation between the state of Karnataka and Region Västra Götaland.

There is a unison tone on the European Forum on Cultural Industries in Barcelona. Cultural and Creative Industries are seen as the driving force of economy in Europe. It’s among the top priorities. Figures presented show that this field employ 15% of Londoners, between 2000-2005 creative industries grew by 10% in Europe which is more than other industries, and holds 3,1% of GDP in Europe. Everyone is here; ministers and bureaucrats from all around Europe and from all levels from European Commission to state, region and local level. Civil servants, University lecturers and professors, and representatives from cultural companies to the business field. And they all agree. Creative Industries hold a potential of economic growth in Europe. This has to be part of the European 2020 strategy.

Spain holds the presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2010. And they have chosen to organize the Forum in cooperation with European Commission and Chamber of Commerce in Barcelona. Perhaps it’s not so surprising. Barcelona has fostered many famous Artists, as Pablo Picasso who grew up here as young, and of course the home of Gaudi, the famous architect and foremost Artist in Art Noveau tradition. Around the city you find Gaudi’s architecture, but also sculptures and Art works done by many other Artists in a mix of modern and traditional. The Catalonian State has put culture high on the agenda and are proud of their Artists.

Perhaps significant of the Forum is the lack of insight among the ministers and bureaucrats of what the creative industries consist of. What it is. The risk of EU putting money into the wrong incentives, and in all good intentions write new declarations that never reach the actual field is large. The expected evaluation of Mike Coyne, Director of Centre for Strategy and Evaluation Services, might be helpful in throwing some light on who all the creators are and their effects on local and regional structures. Also the expected survey by Giep Hagoort, Professor of Art and Economics at Utrecht University and Utrecht School of Arts, this spring is promising. His message being, which is also our experience from the work we have done at Nätverkstan and backed by several reports of this field from among others UK; it’s a field run by Artists within in different Art forms, organized in small-scale, micro and nano businesses and freelancers who work in networks and informal structures. When putting forward incentives and supportive structures in the cultural field, these have to be as complex as the field is.

Also significant is the lack of small-scale Artists in panels and as keynote speakers. They are there, but not as many as you would wish for.  Instead you find some of them outside in an alternative forum, campaigning for the freedom on Internet, led by well-known comic Leo Bassi. Government is promoting a “download law”, which many Artists are protesting against. Inside, at the Forum, several of the Cultural Ministers and other representatives on the contrary put forward the necessity of strong Intellectual Property Rights.

The Forum ended with six of the Cultural Ministers (we missed the Swedish Minister) giving their comments from a parallel meeting where creative industries has been discussed and with the aim of presenting a Green Paper on Culture. A Green paper released by the European Commission is a discussion document, which hope to stimulate debate and be a process for consultation on a topic. It usually comes before the White Paper, which is a more formal document. This was never presented; it was still too unready, but expect the Green Paper coming during spring.

And outside business were going on as usual among our cultural entrepreneurs; street musicians, living sculptures, painters, and other Artistic professionals.

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.

Did you know that in India hand movements are an important part of traditional and contemporary dance, expressing abstractions giving another dimension or parallel understanding to a story or performance? In European dance-tradition feet and foot movement have a central part, we are told. In a dance studio on Oskarsgatan in Göteborg today, dancers and choreographers from Bangalore (India) met professionals from Göteborg (Sweden) in a three-hour workshop. After warming up; experimenting with movements, traditions, experiences took place and ended in a twenty-minute lunch performance for invited guests.

The Bangalore-based Centre for Movement Arts, Attakkalari, is in West Sweden for a tour visit, and started with a full-length performance of Chronotopia at Vara Concert Hall. This was followed by a seminar on their research project and short performances of the choreographers and dancers at Museum of World Cultures in Göteborg. Then workshops with young dancers in Vara, with theatre students at the School of Music and Drama. And now they met with professional dancers and choreographers from Dansbyrån, a production platform for dance based in Göteborg run by the three choreographers Moa Matilda Sahlin, Marika Hedemyr, and Paula de Hollanda.

The idea of a Young Choreographers Platform where choreographers and dancers meet to work and build something together is an integral part of the work at Attakkalari in an ambition to continuously explore and experiment with movements and expression. A sort of lab of movements easily set up with dancers and choreographers from any part of the world if you just have a studio to work in. As Jay Palazhy, Artistic Director at Attakkalari once put it: “The beauty of collaboration is that it’s not about rationalizing. You don’t have to speak so much, just do it”.

The visit of Attakkalari is part of the agreement “Linking Initiatives” between the region of Karnataka and Region Västra Götaland. Read former posts of the exchange project under India on this site.

Surrounded by many of the larger banks in the financial district in London, you find the new non-profit contemporary Art exhibition centre Raven Row. It’s quite anonymous; you easily walk by the low building with the white front, but finding it is rewarding. While the banks and financiers are busy dealing with the recession and building trust, the current exhibition at Raven Row is dealing with other processes in society; the disobedience, subversive cultural ideas, the Art that is often on the edge of what is accepted by society.

“A history of irritated material” is curated by Danish curator Lars Bang Larsen, who explains the title as referring to the relation between Art, and social and psychological reality. Video clips of protest marches, freedom fighters, witness stories, and trials are shown in a set of TVs, works of the New York based Group Material is exhibited together with Artists like Swedish Sture Johannesson. His famous poster from 1968 of the naked woman with a hash-pipe in her hand (Hash Girl) is significant for the exhibition. The poster was done for Lund Art Exhibition Hall (Southern Sweden), but the exhibition was never shown. It was accused of being drug romantic and Sture Johannesson himself stole his controversial posters that made politicians see red from the exhibition hall. The Director at the time, Folke Edwards, was accused of being sex and drug romantic just by showing this work of the well-known Artist. It all ended with the Director leaving his job just after a short time on the post.

Perhaps less subversive, but definitely not mainstream were two concerts at Union Chapel the previous night. Two Swedish bands played in the church, built in 1876 to 1877, from 1991 used as a venue for cultural events (combined with worship, baptism, weddings). The two-people-band The Tiny, and then First Aid Kit, two young women of 17 and 19 years old, inspired by the hippie and country movement of the 70s combined with new sound. Both wonderful bands that manage to form Artistic talent into their own music, their own thing. Funny we have to go to London to see them.

A walk by Tate Modern also leaves traces. The Polish contemporary Artist Miroslaw Balka and his piece “How it is” is both overwhelming and scary. The work is a gigantic container placed in the big open hall at Tate. Walking around the container you feel small, yes, tiny, and in one short-end you enter at a large ramp and walk towards the darkness inside. A chill along the spine as scary film-clips of Holocaust where people in masses walked in to uncertainty come to mind, yet when we are walking we are safe. We know that, but still…What will we meet inside? The exhibition keeps itching and irritating the mind the rest of the day.

And among these visits, we do study visits to discuss social entrepreneurship with Ian Baker at School for Social Entrepreneurs, cultural leadership with Venu Dhupa and Nicola Turner, and the development of the workshop “The Art of living of Art” together with Sian Prime.

Read this text by Lars Bang Larsen on social liability. Some links in relation to School for Social Entrepreneurs are found here, here and for reports and evaluations here. Most photos are taken by Helena Persson, a few with Iphone.

We sit right above the swimming pool, in a former swimming hall, for our meeting with Kate Oakley at City University London (UK). The changing lockers are still on the side, but now used as storage of books and documents. It’s nice, somehow. Nothing can be changed in the hall, Kate Oakley tells us. So if you remove the floor the swimming pool is still there. Now neatly covered and transformed to one of the meeting points and reading rooms for students. Kate Oakley is a writer, policy analyst, and now visiting Professor at Department of Cultural Policy and Management. She has followed and written a lot about creative industries and the new British independents, i.e. the small-scale entrepreneurs. We meet her to talk about the Cultural Leadership Programme at the City University and also creative industries. Where is it going?

UK is the cradle of cultural and creative industries, introduced about a decade ago by the Blair Labour Government and their Creative Industries Mapping Document. But what will happen now with the notion of cultural and creative industries? Kate Oakley says, after some thinking, that she sees a division in argument between on one hand “creativity”, and the other “innovation”. This means that you will find those who argue stronger for the Arts and Arts Policy, and those who enforce innovation in the more narrow sense where aesthetics are used to raise value in more traditional businesses. The creative industries managed to show the practice and everyday life of culture and cultural entrepreneurs, something that tends to get lost in this division.

So, where is the question of creative industries in UK nowadays? 2010 is election year and it’s always a time when not much will happen. And it does seem like the question has slipped from the Labour’s priorities. The Conservatives, on the other hand seem to show more interest in cultural heritage than creative industries. Maybe the recession has forced other priorities in focus, maybe not enough advocacies and lobbying from cultural politicians on fellow politicians in other areas has been done? An experience from a project in Western Sweden with Artists and politicians show that many cultural politicians feel a lack of arguments in relation to other political areas.

We also meet Nicola Turner at the Arts Council and discuss Cultural Leadership and the Cultural Leadership Programme. Quite interesting.

At Creative Choices website you find After the Crunch, a book trying to put light on these issues, and also thoughts about “So what’s next”. Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham wrote the book Creative Industries after the First Decade of Debate, and in 2008 you could listen to many of the leading researchers within cultural and creative industries at a one-day symposium at Milton Keynes, “The Creative Industries: Ten Years After”. Nätverkstan was there, read about it here. This facts file from UK Department of Culture, Media and Sports from 2002 might be useful: ci_fact_file.pdf.

The visit to London is part of a study visit done by Kulturverkstan, the two-year Project Management Training Programme, run by Nätverkstan. Photos taken with Iphone.

Last September Department of Culture together with Department of Enterprise, Energy and Communications proposed to put around 70 million SEK (around 7 million euro) in developing the cultural and creative sector 2009–2012. The aim is to create better conditions for entrepreneurs within culture to develop their business ideas (for Swedish readers look here). Exactly how this will be done is still shrouded in mystery. As it seems it will be done in dialogue on an institutional level. But where are the actual cultural entrepreneurs?

In Region Västra Götaland about the same has been proposed by the Secretariat of Culture together with the Regional Development Secretariat (Trade, business and industry development). An action plan has been developed with ideas on how to work with enterprise development within the cultural field.

One idea, on both state and regional level, is that first of all you need to train business coaches in cultural and creative industries in how this field works. The thought is that money is already put into support like incubators, mentoring, coaching to small and medium enterprises, but these hardly ever reach the cultural entrepreneur. A good thought. Of course this support should also encompass the cultural field. But why hasn’t it so far? Well, basically since all the requirements and methods for support, coaching and mentoring are built on the traditional industry. The thought that other conditions and circumstances might be claimed in the cultural field, is often met with a sigh: “Oh, those Artists think there are so special!”. It’s based on a thought that Artist consider themselves as an elite with very special conditions, a notion also found in the report from the Committee of Inquiry on Cultural Policy last year.

It leads to two thoughts. One is that if Artists find that there are specific conditions in running a business within their field, if this is their notion, the only way to handle it must be to find out what bearing it has. The other is that business coaches easily falling into the argument that there is no difference running a cultural business than running something in other areas have probably never taken the time or effort to seriously analyze how it works running your own business within culture.

Just step into any Art Exhibition Hall in any country, like the exhibition now running at Röda Sten by Artist Sislej Xhafa. Sit down in front of his gigantic sculpture of Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi and reflect on: What is the business model behind this Artist? What is the product he is selling? Could he live on that as a business idea, and if not, what are relevant questions and suggestions to help him find ways to live on his Art?

Nätverkstan has the assignment from Region Västra Götaland together with other partners within culture, to put together a program; training business coaches on how the cultural and creative industries work, and how cultural entrepreneurs run their organizations or businesses. We will keep the readers posted on how this will work out.

A stream of people hurries in from the cold through the revolving door. The big staircase in the centre of the Museum of World Cultures is filled to the rim. Everyone sit squeezed together, some stand up in the end of the stairs, others hang around the reeling at the second floor. We are here to listen to the Göteborg-based choir Amanda singing Haitian songs in support of the catastrophe at Haiti.

Culture has the power of gathering people in joy or grief, in hope or disaster. Last week Swedish dailies showed photos of people in Port-au-Prince at Haiti gathering in the streets to sing in an act to find the strength to endure. The event in Göteborg gathered hundreds of people wanting to show their sympathy, solidarity and grief. I wonder at how many places around the world things like this take place right now? Where culture becomes the bridge and channel to get the strength to go on, feel hope, or just mourn.

Downstairs is the last day of the exhibition “Vodou”, the culture and religion based in Haiti, which was brought by African slaves transported to work for the colonial powers. Haiti was the first of former colonized states gaining independence through slave rebellion in 1804. And then run by former slaves. The exhibition shows Vodou to be one of the strong sub cultural forces from which slaves got their collective power to fight their oppressors. Song and music from drums is a strong element in Vodou. In US, the power African Americans got from gospel and spirituals, music in connection with strong religious ideas, played an important role in the change from slavery to civil rights in the late 1800s. At Haiti the Dictators Papa Doc and Baby Doc to run political terror between 1957 and 1986 used the same Vodou.

Song, dance, music. Cultural expressions and collective power. The people leaving the museum after the concert today felt a sense of hope. It was an act of solidarity. In Europe, our Cultural Departments at all levels are working towards a more quantity-based measurement of the results and effects of culture. Results of people’s cultural experiences are to be shown in economic figures. Effects should be formulated in measurable, long-term incentives; they must be quantified. So, how do you measure the effect of this?

Göteborg University is planning a one-year master on Art an Entrepreneurship. The idea is that students start in Göteborg and do part of the education in Bangalore, India. Hopefully the part in Bangalore would be Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology.

A base for the cooperation would be student exchange, where Indian students go to Sweden and the other way around. For Swedish students there are great opportunities in learning a completely different environment, spend a longer time in a different context to get input about Art and entrepreneurship by mixing the theoretical with social practice.

Satyajit Ray, the very well-known Bengali (Indian) filmmaker (1921-1992) says in his book first published in 1976, that he learnt one lesson of film making. It is “(…) by far the most physically demanding of all activities that are dignified by the epithet ‘creative’”. ”The whole process takes place in three broad stages: writing, filming and editing”, he writes and continues: “All three are creative; but while in the first and the third one uses mainly one’s head, the second calls for the use of all one’s faculties - celebral, physical and emotional - going full steam at all times.”

Somehow our meeting at Toonskool, the education on animation, is about this. It’s about film making with animation, where you need several skills: craftsmanship of animation, cinema and film, filming, lighting, editing…Toonskoll started in 2004 and is India’s first degree programme in animation we are told. They have around 1000 students around India and the school is about the Art of animation. The focus is on the Artistic side and they even offer a course in acting so the student will better understand movement on stage as they animate their films. The concept is a lot about “learning by doing” with the idea that you learn from your mistakes.

School of Film Directing in Goteborg has prolonged ideas of starting a school of animation in Sweden, and in the light of Toonskool, this seems necessary. How else will the field of animation evolve? Tarik Saleh, a film maker in Sweden, just launched the first full-length animated film in Sweden, Metropia (see clip below), a great piece of work. But how do you get more people involved in such risky and difficult projects? How do you make sure that skills are there for future projects?

An interesting discussion where film making, film directing and animation films seem very close in the thinking behind the making.

The visit is part of an exchange set up by Region Vastra Gotaland and Karnataka. Read o former post on animation in West Sweden and the making of Metropia here.

Gunilla Bursteadt and Leif Eriksson from Film School of Directing in Göteborg are discussing film education in Bangalore with Prakash Belawadi, filmmaker, and N Vidyashankar, Suchitra Cinema & Cultural Academy. What should an education look like with the aim of educating independent filmmakers in the Indian context? How do you secure a multi-level and cross-cultural approach in education?

The visit is part of the exchange between Karnataka, India, and Region Västra Götaland, Sweden that started in 2007.

Archana Prasad, an Artist in Bangalore, has been extremely active the last year. It started about a year ago when she was having her first single exhibition in Bangalore and confronted the lack of Art spaces. There was no good Art space around at a decent price. She had her exhibition, but out of the experience grew a drive to find solutions.

So she started, together with colleague-Artists, a series of initiatives. Jagaa, described in the former post, was one of them. What if you could build a movable Art space and use empty spaces in town to temporarily put it up? The solution was one architect with a piece of land and a construction-site solution of an open gallery. The construction fits into one container when taken down into pieces and takes about a day to put up.

Together with a collective of Artists, she started another gallery, Samuha, where they shared a space to put up exhibitions. Just recently the Artist Raghavendra Rao had an exhibition called “Between Yes and No”, where poetry met performance and movement. Archana is also releasing a web-based journal starting next week, Art and the City, where the Art scene in different Indian cities will be analyzed.

Another interesting space is 1 Shanti Road, an Artist led initiative that is a venue for exhibitions, seminars, debate, space and incubator of experimentation of contemporary Art.