Antiheroes confirmed the venue for LOTE5: it will be the head office of the European cooperative for creative professionals SMartBE http://smartbe.be/.
This is great news especially for the creative/cultural industries track! SMartBE simplifies the lives of artists and cultural workers (their main solution: a mutual invoicing system) and supports them in their professional path with information, trainings, legal advice, van rentals, subsidies, etc. They seem to unfail the system pretty well since in 15 years they managed to engaged 70,000 members in 8 different countries and count on a 155 staff working from 10 offices across Belgium. They’re very often cited as an example of the best practice in the sector: they offer a solution between employment and entrepreneurship that can inspire also the refugee track.
Pierre and Lieza (our contact people) are enthusiast about hosting LOTE5, it seems that their board of directors engaged incredibly fast after taking a look at the LOTE4 video. They would like to extend their partnership and help with reaching out their community and communicating for us, organize side/night activities in Brussels Art Factory and LaVallée (co-working spaces for creatives) and some logistics.
This Friday they’re having their Christmas dinner in some of the rooms that we might use for LOTE5 in February, the Brussels-based fellows are invited to chip in at 7:30 for a short visit.
For those of you that missed today’s community call you can read a recap and call to action curated by Nadia here.
Hey Kira, hope you all had a nice Friday party and got on the same page even more with out hosts in SmartBE. Curious if you have an idea on how many rooms to dispose of for Lote5 and the number of people they hold.
At a minimum, it looks like we will have OpenCare track occupying one room for the whole of Lote, and the rest of the tracks occupying another.
The party on Friday was fun, the encounter Edgeryders - SmartBE was promising. Everybody liked each other and is feeling excited.
For the rooms: we can have at least 3-4 that our close to one another, plus another one two that our further down (the total venue is pretty big). So basically 5 sessions can be held comfortably along side. The biggest can hold up to a 100 (but more if some peolpe stand or sit on pillows), the smallest is for about 12 people. All the other are in-between.
We have to provide a ‘fich technique’ of what we need. We can use things (chairs, cutlery, pillows, materials, etc) from there and from another venue in Molenbeek.
Sounds like heaven. So we can comfortably plan sessions in parallel for smaller groups then. So far it’s not the case that we have more than two in parallel, but wanted to be sure.
We asked Pierre for ground plans, and he promised to provide them. Now that will be a full answer, and one we can share on the website.
But I confirm that we’ll have space. There is also an opportunity to involve SmartBE people more in LOTE5, specifically with the creative industry track. Maybe we should hold there the next apéro?
