decentralised networks of care

This open call for speakers is for a COST funded Training School focusing on cultural care and its subservient function to politics, economy, bureaucratic decisions, and the environment.

In the EU, not all arts funding policies are created equal and official statistics reveal that there are big disparities between countries. This inequality is mirrored in the arts production, dissemination, presentation, the sustainability of organisations and artists, and also in the quality of the events presented to the public.

This training program will discuss the problems that the cultural ecosystem faces and emphasise the crucial role that non-governmental organisations play in this system.

Although art is big business, where few artists and organisations are able to command large sums of money for their work, the vast majority are ignored, underfunded or dismissed by critics, and funders. According to Gregory Sholette marginalised artists and, for the purpose of this call, we would argue, NGOs, are the “dark matter” of the art world, and are essential to the survival of the mainstream, but, as NGOs, with their limited resources empower their presence, he also asks the question “must the representation of institutional power function just as well as the real thing?” As the hierarchies of our world are reflected in the art world, some non government organisations “speak clown to power,” for “clowns always speak of the same thing, they speak of hunger; hunger for food, hunger for sex, but also hunger for dignity, hunger for identity, hunger for power. In fact, they introduce questions about who commands, who protests.”

Despite their significant contributions to the artists, communities, and the economy, cultural nonprofit organisations face numerous challenges. These include the aforementioned funding constraints, but also, competition for resources, and changing audience demographics, reducing the role of cultural NGO workers in many countries as hobbyists with their work not sufficiently recognised as a vital part of the cultural economy, the development of the arts, and societal health.

The political, economic, social, and hierarchical (patriarchal) managerial systems and power structures in which cultural workers (in the case of visual arts: art directors, curators, historians, producers, artists, etc) try to function, force them into a survival mode and compels them to compete with each other for very limited funding. The EU system and structure appears to have been built to discipline the art world toward serving a productive ideal. This restriction clashes with the realities involved in the arts such as the confined funding sources, time limitations for research and development, production, presentation, dissemination, and distribution.

The training school Decentralised Networks of Care is symptomatic of our experience in cultural work in the EU and beyond and recognises its constitutive role in supporting Cultural NGO’s who provide the artists with the platform and opportunity to present artistic value.

Decentralised Networks of Care aims to make cultural labour visible within the context of power relations in the art world. It aims to develop an implementing framework securing resources to change the art environment’s precarious conditions. Some of these areas of concern are the exploitative issues incorporated in the institutional, economic, and political infrastructures that constitute cultural bodies.