This is a wiki summary of one of our community calls. Anyone can edit it and make corrections! Attended: @MariaEuler @oliiive @DanicaLacarac, @enzio.wetzel, and myself.
Maria: most of her plans for this year have been changed. With the Design University in Stockholm we have moved a workshop online and we are going to make a film project where students contribute their own snippets. We are going to search material representations of connections.
Olivier: Doing an online course, and trying to to manage his time between calls and ebinars everywhere. He’s unemployed, and wants to help people to improve their French.
Danica: An architect focused on green cities and urban nature. ‘This new situation has cut all of our funding. I’m thinking of not stopping, maybe deliver a podcast or similar, that can go online, so we can continue to share the knowledge.’ Has an improvised studio in the apartment, so can start.
This whole thing is going to force forward people’s approaches in everyday life. We will recollect our actions and maybe change something tomorrow
Danica’s association is part of a European Federation in 15 countries leading in green cities, and there is a lot of valuable information and experiences that we all share.
I wanted to collect all and bring it to Serbia too. We are very very far from being a green city in Novi Sad, but the awareness of the people is starting to get higher. That’s why I want to continue with my actions.
Noemi: proposed to think about urban greening together with the Edgeryders and Reef network - we would love to get new partners and see for example: what, if anything, from the Green Urban Living repository created end of 2019 can be a topic for a podcast?
Enzio: arrived 7 months ago in Japan at the Goethe Institute, before he worked in Sofia and Munich for a long time, also for Goethe. Many of his colleagues now have to learn how to teach the same things, but online (video, stage design,…), and struggling, especially those who are older.
In Kyoto the Goethe Institute run an artist residence:
what to do here in a residence without residents? how to develop new ideas if you dont have the target group, the guests… The challenge for his team of 6 is: what should we do instead? It’s an inner crisis. Maybe we can find out some new methods to rethink the concept of a residency
It’s not clear how the Japanese groups will cope with this challenge - without an audience, without a job. It’s the kind of work defining your personality. Japan takes a lot of time to think and develop new things.
There are many challenges inside the institutions and personalities in culture. For example in Japan there is not much structure of independence, they invest 10% of what Germany invests in culture. It will be good this year to remove the masks at least online, to exchange about how others cope with this challenge
‘I feel alienated’, one of us said. This cultural shock is alienating. We are all ‘forced to force ideas forward’… It’s an important step forward to try to search for other experiences with online means.
[Noemi note: notice this gap - someone said something personal, but it’s hard to continue because the personal is tied to the professional, so it becomes a conversation about ‘our kind’]
What would be innovation in culture?
- Build networks of artists and practitioners who understand and know how to make use of support, and engage in constant ways of rethinking work (especially people between 20-40yrs). Example: Cultural Innovators Network, in particular in the Mediterranean area. For individuals - important to learn how to make use of networks and connections and don’t expect the institutional environments to come up with resources, because the way they work is not compatible. Everyone minds their own business in a way…
- Go beyond the high level art, understand how to the social community work is connected to artistic production, how the needs of the city can connect with culture.
- Figure out how to embed the online: ex- how to put together an online residency. There’s a big gap between European/Japanese way of organising, but is there a chance to make this visible, experience-able online? Of course, it would never be the aim to make all cultural activities online. We will always long for direct, analogue contact.
- If it’s digital it’s free - wrong. How to find ways for artists to put their work online to an extent? Or to even work online and use more affordable, open source tools?
Next steps:
- Which of these aspects would you like to see discussed at length in a curated session/ webinar? We are making a wishlist here!
- How are you coping with loss of work? Fill out this 15 min survey and we’ll create the story to help you connect faster with the network
- Join our regular calls each Tuesday at 12pm Brussels timezone: http://bit.ly/coronawork