Kate Sutton’s Post

#CrAFtCities are exploring how the #NewEuropeanBauhaus an be an extra gear towards climate-positive cities and communities #EUCitiesMission. In Horizpn Magazine you can read more about how we do that

This week marked a significant moment in the UK as Berlin’s Creative Bureaucracy Festival debuted in Bristol, hosted at Watershed by Andrew Kelly and Bristol Ideas. Guided by Charles Landry, highly respected author and advocate for creative cities, the festival embodied a compelling paradox. It urged attendees to reimagine bureaucratic structures, infusing them with fresh ideas and ingenuity for transformative outcomes, while also serving as a celebration of these innovations. Discussions covered advocating for innovative institutions and community-led micro-housing models, embracing living-lab experimentation, and tapping into surplus city capacity. Amidst the dialogue emerged another significant theme, the importance of considering both positive and negative feedback loops in system change. Donella Meadows' concept of feedback loops highlighted positive amplifications and negative stabilisations in systems. Strengthening Creative Bureaucracy enhances effectiveness, but could also perpetuate harmful system risks, prolonging their existence and impacts. Exploring how Creative Bureacracy can moderate, slow down, or 'hospice' outdated elements could harness people's boundless creativity to replace embedded hierarchies, narratives, and biases. This could lead to the emergence of new relationships, systems, and structures that enhance the lives of people and planet. Noteworthy was the call for creative 'democracy' over 'bureaucracy’ suggesting a promising path for more inclusive and accountable governance. Whether through Citizens' Assemblies, quadratic voting, or Public Common Partnerships, Creative Democracy merits further exploration. Applauding the festival's role in linking global creative bureaucracies, it's crucial to address entrenched system and power imbalances. The evolution towards Creative Democracies offers inspiration but requires navigating significant challenges, as Meadows recognised, changing paradigms is the ultimate lever, albeit the most difficult to pul!

Despairing about the state of the world? Don't - just start keeping better company! Let's leave it to the #artists, #artisans, and #storytellers to bring us to our senses... If you're in Ireland and the #ImagineBelfast festival from March 18th to 24th isn't on your radar - put it there. (ImagineBelfast.com) Experience all or part of our seven days of #creativity in action. There are talks and tours, conversations, storytelling, and exhibitions recalling, reframing, and imagining our past, our present, and our social, economic, and political futures. Sustainability, the environment, and our collective social and emotional well-being take center stage. Need more time to prepare? This European initiative - over the course of a month - #LiquidBecomings will offer much the same in the Fall across 13 countries. "It is not an exhibition. It is not even in a single location. Liquid Becomings is a journey, an adventure, a radical experiment. Setting sail on September 1 for 28 days, four boats will travel simultaneously along four European rivers: the Danube, the Vistula, the Rhine, and the Tagus, ....crews of artists and captains will each focus on different themes: Ruins and Monsters, Perimeters, Togetherness, and Bodies and Politics." #Engage - action is the antidote to despair. We can all choose an active role as neighbors and citizens. And it doesn't have to look or feel like hard work. Showing up supports and inspires those on the front lines - and the strength of our numbers brings a sense of gravity and urgency to their messages. Creative Lives, Kevin Murphy, Alan Meban, Denis Stewart, Joseph Devlin, Michelle Gallen, Anne McMaster, Mary McManus, Una Murphy, Christine James, Dani McFerran, Marianne Kennerley, Veronica Morris, Steven Agnew, John Barry, Andrew Haley, Edina Salcinovic, Maria Kontarini, Christian Renson, Wellbeing Economy Alliance - WEAll #wellbeingeconomy #sustainability #servantleadership #creativeeconomy , https://lnkd.in/eFfksYjR

Call for Contributions: This year's State of the Arts Symposium will revolve around the theme 'Renewing Common Pathways'. Art and culture provide tools to dream and reimagine ways of doing and being, allowing people to connect and share. How can art and culture keep the commons alive and how can the commons sustain art and culture? Arts Council Malta is issuing a Call for Contributions, for whoever is interested in being part of the Symposium programme. The contributions can address the following: - How can a practice of commoning sustain the socio-economic status and working conditions of creatives? - How can commoning processes challenge the current limiting and limited art funding structures? - How can spaces and infrastructure become more available, accessible and affordable through commoning practices? - How can shared values and an ethics of care open up access to a wider group of practitioners with different needs and experiences, leading to better equity? - How can a process of commoning provide a wider variety of artforms and practices, relevant to more diverse audiences?  - How can a practice of commoning unify and consolidate efforts towards the development of formal and non-formal learning? https://lnkd.in/dJ6DGPQ8

George Kekatos, Senior Cultural Strategist, took part in the Public Policy Exchange webinar 'Promoting the Cultural and Creative Industries' yesterday, bringing together policy makers, cultural leaders, strategists and academics to discuss the role of #culture, the #creativeindustries and #placemaking in delivering #socialvalue for communities. Read his post below to find out more about Futurecity's 'Gallery Without Walls' approach to culture-led collaboration and partnerships and its transformative power for cities. #GalleryWithoutWalls #culturalplacemaking #PublicPolicyExchange #policymakers #culturalcity #Futurecity

The recent surge of news headlines announcing the impending and/or permanent closure of various Museums and Art Galleries is deeply concerning. Having seen and read three or four such articles over the past few weeks; one can only imagine the bleak situation that these institutions found themselves in; and this most likely only represents a fraction of the hidden struggles occurring across the sector. Beyond the pandemic, cultural institutions are navigating a complex and evolving landscape: dwindling funding, outdated operating models, difficulties attracting skilled professionals, shifting audience preferences, and ever-escalating operating costs. Yes, the issues that these institutions are facing are complex and require a multi-disciplinary approach to address them. However, the first step should be the introduction of agile and forward-looking practices. Interventions cannot always only be launched and implemented towards the end. But then again. This is my opinion.

One of the greatest struggles that any creative will experience – whether they be musicians, artists, writers, or anything – is finding like-minded peers who share your vision and appetite. But what if there was a way to connect with those people, to find your tribe, and to be amongst supportive individuals? That's where names like Tileyard London come into things. Having initially started as just a few studios with a tiny café, it soon blossomed into a creative arts hub, where people of all fields – artists, bands, management companies, distributors, and more – can come together to share their talents, efforts, and resources in what has since become a globally recognised creative community. With a myriad functions, ranging from offering studio facilities (and hosting names like Drake and Mark Ronson), to being a venue, to boasting co-working spaces, amenities, educational facilities (Tileyard Education), a management, publishing, and record company, and just about everything else you could possible imagine, it goes without saying that if you want Tileyard to do something, it probably already does it. For our latest Venue Spotlight, we spoke to Tileyard's Head of Partnerships and Events, Bryan Borcherds, about the history of Tileyard, the initial vision, and how things have grown. Read the full feature here: https://lnkd.in/g4krVAxu

This year's journal is now up on our website. Over the next few months we will be spotlighting the work of our contributors. This week we are looking at 'Levelling Up and (not) placemaking: are we there yet? '. The article was written by artist, writer and curator Judith Stewart. "This contribution to Engage is informed by my politics and involvement over the past 30 years with arts organisations as an artist, curator, researcher and academic. In it I want to consider the ways in which our desire within the sector to make culture accessible to all is frustrated by institutional values and the ways in which the subtleties of language trap us into habitual ways of working, making us complicit in ensuring the perpetuation of the status quo." Communities and care is a response to the UK Government’s ‘Levelling up’ agenda connected to a perceived lack of culture or other infrastructure. At its core, is the idea of engaging communities, most often used in the professional arts sector to refer to collective groups working together, defined by a distinguishing factor across a shared experience. Take a journey through visual art practice, engagement and participation in the era of placemaking and levelling up, simultaneously exploring the uses of the word care in relation to this work. Login with your member details to read our journals:

Interesting article and further analysis from Martin S. below. I agree with his comments below. Having studied the formation of creative industries policy before New Labour came to power for an AHRC project on cultural policy under New Labour (with David Hesmondhalgh, Kate Oakley and Melissa Nisbett), and speaking to many of the key people involved, it was clear that there was a significant amount of work that went on before 1997 in formulating a strategy for the creative industries. Much of the work had already been done. There was a narrative, a story to tell, which is missing now. Of course it's a completely different context now, but while that story might be missing, on the other hand there is so much more data now (although still many contestations about it!), more actors and agencies in this space (some new, some around in 1997 but in different forms), more academic research. I wonder if I was working on that AHRC project again but looking back at this period, what story we'd tell, and who the key architects of this administrations cultural policy would be!