Blivande applied for funding together with Institute for X in Aarhus, Guvuhver in Reykjavik, and Trans Europe Halles for “Short-term network funding” from Nordic Culture Point. I also added Edgeryders to the application, but it’s basically just me doing work that I would have done in the project pro-bono anyway. Blivande is the coordinator, and we received 19,000 EUR for the project.
Here is the application. (74.1 KB)
Short-term network funding is granted mainly for travel and exchange between cultural institutions in the Nordics. Since the room for funding salaries would be minimal anyway, we decided to forgo it and just fund travel and accommodation for a total of 9-11 people from these organizations, for three “embassy weeks” in these cities - one week in each location, spread out over 2021.
Our goal with this project is:
To develop cultural centers founded on principles of do-ocracy and participatory design. Such centers decentralize decision making and have different needs than centers with centrally curated programs. They also rely on unhindered convening in physical space which has been hard in the pandemic, calling for development of participatory processes online. We bring together three participatory cultural centers, one partner in online community building and one network of 80+ cultural spaces.‘’
Our deliverables are minimal - we carry out these three embassy weeks, and round it up with writing a short report of a few pages, and present our findings in an online seminar.
For now, there are no action points. Just keeping you in the loop about that this is happening, and that the Edgeryders logo will be on the materials. If you can think of synergies with other projects, let me know. I am already tying this in with the proposal to Kulturbryggan for convening and online conversation on how to reform funding in the culture and arts.
This might open up some opportunities, and it goes to show that these funds are a viable option for the sort of things we do. For example - here we got 19,000 EUR for travel and accommodation. It would be a viable option for us to use this sort of funding in tandem with other projects to make more room for things like travel stipends for community members to our events.
