Solutions

Blog

The best we can. Re-establishing priorities for arts professionals in times of crisis

Arts professionals think that their work is important for society. Nevertheless, when it comes to defining or formulating this value in concrete terms, most of them fail to do so. Far from being able to establish the relevance of what they do for the people they aim to serve, they often seem to be totally unaware of what is going on around them and little informed on contemporary issues that affect their communities. Cuts in budgets for Culture, shrinking teams and an absurd demand for “doing more with less” have further intensified the disconnect between cultural organisations and society. The uncritical execution of repetitive tasks, therefore, has become a comfortable norm, where there seems to be little place for critical thinking, imagination, creativity and, ultimately, happiness. Can there be a way out from this swamp?

Audio

Solidarity Funding: Western European Dominance

Solidarity is a complex construct which can have many different perspectives due to individual belief, social, ethnic and cultural background. When it comes to solidarity in funding, it is mostly Euro-centric interpretation of the financing which refers mostly exclusively to Western and Northern Europe. The group extracted six prototypes of solidarity funding: solidarity manifesto, game, solidarity tax on Creative Europe funding which would be directed to the non-eligible states, social network based on solidarity and b'n'b platform opened for non-artist which would serve as basis for mobility fund.

Method

Changing the Game: The RESHAPE Transition

This text is a first attempt to join the dots between the proposals, to draft the initial contours of a framework for understanding them. To understand the proposals, it can be useful to first have a brief look at the origins and the promise of RESHAPE, and how the project itself was redesigned and reshaped during an intensive process within the RESHAPE community. Secondly, we begin a reflection on how these proposals might contribute to responding to the current needs within the arts field. In very different ways, these proposals respond to increasing pressures concerning how the arts are organized, governed, and supported (or not).

News

Online workshop: more than fifty people had joined ‘The Gamified Workshop Toolkit’

Flanders Arts Institute, Ettijahat - Independent Culture and Pogon - Zagrebački centar za nezavisnu kulturu i mlade organized an online session of testing ‘The Gamified Workshop Toolkit: Values of Solidarity’ prototype. The prototype was developed by Anikó Rácz, Doreen Toutikian, and Dorota Ogrodzka, within the frame of the Solidarity Economies trajectory group. It was especially designed for teams that are just beginning their collaboration, primarily in the field of arts and culture, but also in other relevant sectors.

Workshop

Value of art in social fabric: Remote Lisbon Workshop

The remote work within the RESHAPE group continues, this time in remote Lisbon. The group Value of Art in Social Fabric will work from 26 to 29 May on shaping their prototypes that will offer new approaches to this topic. They will work collectively on identifying their narrative on “reshaping the value of art in the social fabric”, in order to propose concrete, sustainable and realistic solutions for the art sector.

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