In April 2024, On the Move held its Cultural Mobility Forum in Caernarfon in collaboration with Wales Arts International and with support from the European Union and the British Council. The third edition of this annual event, which was also live-streamed to a global audience on the platform HowlRound, gathered network members from four continents as well as local and national arts workers to publicly discuss international professional development in a context of geopolitical inequality and unrest.
The event was centred around four panels with cultural experts from diverse backgrounds based in Tunisia, Georgia, England, Belgium, Poland, Morocco, Jamaica, Northern Ireland, Singapore, Italy, and Portugal and sparked lively feedback from attendees. Gathering almost two-hundred people across two days, the group discussed how issues such as cultural policy, economic constraints, and post-colonial legacies influence the opportunities that artists and culture professionals have – and, often, don’t have – to expand the scope of their aesthetic research, production, and dissemination outside of their home countries.
From left to right: Milica Ilic, Tamar Janashia and Ouafa Belgacem at On the Move’s 2024 Cultural Mobility Forum in Caernarfon, Wales.
“In the past, very few of us had this chance” to be internationally mobile, says Tamar Janashia, founding Director of the non-profit Culture and Management Lab in Tbilisi. “Today, things have opened a little bit more (actually much more)…and we are a little more equal.” Though, as moderator of the first panel Points of departure, points of arrival Milica Ilic pointed out in her introduction, we live in a world “marked by unequal power relations” and “heavily influenced by political agendas.”
Georgia – the post-Soviet, South Caucasus country where Janashia is based – has “been traditionally a melting point of different cultures,” a phenomenon she says continues to this day. A significant number of Ukrainian refugees have arrived there since the start of the Russian invasion, and Janashia recently discovered the existence of “a very big artistic community” in the capital that is part of the Belarusian diaspora. Despite this “huge influx of very creative people, there is no internationalisation at all because we have no idea what is happening on the next street to us,” she explained, highlighting that merely crossing an international border is insufficient to create meaningful cross-cultural exchange. Through a recent collaborative programme that took cultural managers from Central Asia to Germany for ten days, Janashia has seen firsthand the power of establishing contacts abroad through in-person meetings and being concretely inspired by foreign ways of doing things. She sees experiencing “how things happen in reality and on a bigger scale” as a way for her colleagues from neighbouring countries such as Armenia and Azerbaijan to escape the influence of the “Russian-speaking area,” which she says limits their possibilities for development.
Ouafa Belgacem, founder of the Tunis-based Culture Funding Watch for Africa and Southwest Asia, has her own perspective on the intersection of foreign influence and international cultural mobility. “Most of the ecosystems in my continent are depending on international aid or international partners,” she explains. “When it’s not your money, you don’t put your [own] priorities” front and centre or have the opportunity to design programmes with your primary interests in mind. Belgacem says that she dreams of a future in which the creative and cultural industries on the African continent are “funded by our own resources, whether it’s government or private sector or philanthropists.” In the meantime, she describes the current situation of international cultural professional development in her region as ad hoc. “It’s not structured,” she explains. “It’s based on the opportunities that come,” and not generally the result of thorough strategic planning. Belgacem explains that this, too, is a result of dependence on foreign funds. She is convinced that “if you are not financially independent, you cannot establish the right strategies for yourself.” She also sees it as “totally fair” that professional development programmes backed by European funding are “designed based on the needs of their ecosystem – that’s their mandate.” But what is lacking in the Global South, she says, “is that we don’t have the same thing for us.”
As an example of how foreign agendas can unduly influence international cooperation at a regional level, Janashia has observed a tendency by Western cultural operatives working in her area to lump partners from different countries together because of geographic proximity or shared political history. She says that this can feel “artificial” or “forced,” often creating outcomes that she describes as “not very successful.” Janashia has also noticed a tendency for certain artists to “self-exoticise” when engaging with Western institutions, “because sometimes people think that they don’t have enough tools to talk about what they are trying to do” in a way that will be legible in a different cultural and political context. As for Belgacem, she’s been experimenting with technological solutions and creating digital connections with her peers across Africa. It’s “not a substitute for physical meetings,” she says, but, in a context with few resources, it gives her the opportunity to spread knowledge and teach vital skills while she holds on to her personal dream of non-Western cultural practitioners being fully independent from EU agendas in the future. “Let’s face it,” she says bluntly, “power balance is all about money. When we are not equal, it’s not a real partnership – it’s fake.”
From left to right: Anna Galas-Kosil, Laura Ganza and Sarah Philp at On the Move’s 2024 Cultural Mobility Forum in Caernarfon, Wales.
“This is maybe not the best strategy to keep a job that we’ve found,” jokes Laura Ganza, a programme manager at the Brussels-based NGO Africalia. “International solidarity and the arts are not the two subjects that the extreme right loves the most,” she points out. Her comments come in response to a question posed by Anna Galas-Kosil, moderator of the panel Valuing international cultural collaboration, with regards to supporting international collaboration in a context of intensifying conservative nationalism across Europe. “If we could solve this problem, then we could all go home!,” replies Sarah Philp, Deputy Director of Delfina Foundation in London, with a hint of ironic laughter in her voice. Given the current geopolitical situation, she thinks that organisations “can make a stronger case” for working internationally, but admits that “there still aren’t a lot of funders that will give you the money” to do so.
Despite these challenges, the Delfina Foundation offers a unique residency programme in London to a cohort of visual artists from all over the world, 70% of whom, says Philp, come from “the Global South and diaspora communities.” The centre typically hosts eight artists from different countries to share work and living space together, and welcomes “about 40 in total every year.” They’re there to do research, meaning that “it’s more about providing space and time to think, to connect, to discuss, to experiment, and collaborate,” says Philip, without the expectation to make or produce work. Because the majority of the artists in residency at Delfina “haven’t been to Europe before,” the Foundation offers a group professional development programme with a variety of activities that individual participants can opt into or out of. “It’s all about making connections,” explains Philp. “It’s all about supporting artists to grow in confidence in how they present their work, how they talk about their work, and finding opportunities for them.” These efforts start by clarifying what Deflina is able to offer the artists it hosts. “As a staff, we put ourselves in the kind of role of facilitator and mediator,” says Philp. Before and during their stay, residents are asked questions such as, “What do you want to get out of this? What can we do for you? Who would you like to meet? Where would you want to go? What can we help with, what can we facilitate?”
Discussion is also at the core of how Africalia works with the partner organisations it supports. Ganza, who serves as a point of contact with initiatives the NGO supports financially and otherwise in Kenya and Zimbabwe, explains that “we do take a very long time to exchange about how we are going to design partnerships.” The process, she says, “takes us about a year,” a time during which they attempt, as much as possible, to respond to the needs of those they are supporting. “We do need to take the time to make sure that at every step of the way, I am not just setting the goals of Africalia… that this vision is not the only one represented in the partnership,” says Ganza. She explains that this way of working is intentional “because we will ask for reporting, for example, from those partners and asking for reporting in exchange for money can very quickly look like we are their boss and that we are deciding what they should do, which is very different if you are the ones who have written what you want to achieve in a five years’ contract.” She has observed a general tendency that, when it comes to successful international collaboration, “we want it to be fast,” though Ganza admits that the reality is usually quite different – “it’s slow!”
Africalia also takes particular care to connect the partner organisations they support, says Ganza, “with other cultural actors who are working in the same framework as them, or in ways that can inspire them,” often from neighbouring countries. Overarching goals often include creating “a more professionalised ecosystem” in sub-Saharan Africa, which is ultimately most effective when done communally. It’s vital, says Ganza, “not be the only one, [but] to have other people that they can exchange with and support each other.” Similarly, Delfina has been observing and encouraging “peer-led support, learning, and action-research,” which residents often end up “facilitating for each other,” says Philp. The Foundation has an ambition that relationships built during the artists’ time in London “will help strengthen ecosystems,” elsewhere, once they’ve returned to their local contexts. “But also we end up creating connections that bypass London, the Global North, or even the Western art world completely,” she says, calling it “an extraordinary privilege” to help generate such new and unlikely connections between artists and across borders.
From left to right: Katelijn Verstraete, Marwane Fachane and Kim-Marie Spence at On the Move’s 2024 Cultural Mobility Forum in Caernarfon, Wales.
“For me, ‘the centre’ and ‘the periphery’ can change every day,” says Marwane Fachane, Managing Director of Hiba Foundation in Rabat. “We can address ‘the centre’ and ‘the periphery’ in geographic terms… but we can also address them in terms of attention,” he muses, implying that “the centre” can be thought of as whatever is dominating public attention at any given moment. But “if we’re talking about ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in terms of power, money, and resources – unfortunately, not much has changed” counters Kim-Marie Spence, a lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at Queen’s University in Belfast who comes from Jamaica. “I think it’s important to realise just how embedded and entrenched old-school colonial structures are,” she says, addressing the room. “For some of us, the reality of those power structures impact on our day-to-day existence.”
When asked by Internationalisation from the peripheries panel moderator Katelijn Verstraete about decolonisation, Spence replies that culture professionals doing international work have a “responsibility to know the history of the relations that [they] are continuing.” This includes, she says, understanding their country’s economic and immigration policies as “implicit cultural policies” that can have impact well beyond national borders. “As much as I talk about the centre of money and power, it’s also assumed that innovation and knowledge is at the centre. And I’m like, ‘Hmm, those are not the same things,’” says the well-travelled academic. “In the global cultural economy, innovation is also another term for resilience…When you come from certain places, that’s like how you have to work.” Spence cites examples of collaborative innovation within the popular music industry in her home country, Jamaica, that have arisen from significant constraints, including a lack of formal infrastructure (funding, dedicated venues) for culture – a context that, for all its challenges, fosters an ability to adapt rapidly to changing conditions. “Why can’t [others] respect that this is a valid and probably sometimes a better way to do things?,” she asks, speaking of more community-driven ways of working, while explaining that many existing funding models “assume the learning is coming from the centre” – meaning the well-resourced West.
“That level of informality, honestly, it’s what works,” adds Fachane. “You don’t see a problem and stop. You expect to find a way to solve it. You just ask your buddies, ‘Do you know someone who can do something?’ It’s a question of mindset.” There are other cultural perspectives, however, that he sees as being more limiting, especially when it comes to working on an international level. “The concept of being mobile is not defined the same in our mindset,” he explains. “If you are in Morocco, studied in Morocco, even though you have a higher education degree, there are some concepts about mobility and about trips [abroad] and about access [to other places] that your mind does not know. Not because you’re underprivileged, but because your country is not ‘supposed’ to have access to that.” Though Fachane refuses “to see developed countries as ‘the centre’ and us developing countries or less developed countries as ‘the periphery’,” he admits that he has observed a tendency, among Arabic-speaking countries, to “only look at what we consider being the El Dorado of development, being the centre of power money. We have this inability to look at our peers.”
Like Spence, Fachane was particularly impressed and inspired by how non-Western musicians adapted during the Covid-19 pandemic. When performance venues and touring were shut down to decrease the spread of the virus, “digital monetisation became a major way for artists in our region to make money,” says Fachane, “it was a game changer.” But he has also observed artists being “pushed very hard” to perform virtually as a way of reducing carbon emissions from aeroplane travel. “But what does that mean in terms of the payment?,” asks Spence. “A lot of times this whole notion of [environmental] footprint also means, ‘I don’t have to pay you’,” or at least not as much. “Let’s not forget that in the end, centre and periphery is, for artists, majorly linked to livelihood,” adds Fachane. When many artists travel to global financial capitals, “it’s because they want to be able to pay their bills.”
From left to right: Giuliana Ciancio, Nike Jonah, Vânia Rodrigues and Carlotta Garlanda at On the Move’s 2024 Cultural Mobility Forum in Caernarfon, Wales.
“I avoid thinking about the future, to be really honest,” admits Vânia Rodrigues, Coordinator of the Postgraduate Diploma in Arts Management and Sustainability at the University of Coimbra where she also co-directs the interdisciplinary research platform Modes of Production – Performing Arts in Transition. She says that such projections give her anxiety, especially as a “precarious worker.” In contrast, Nike Jonah, Co-Executive Director of the Pan-African Creative Exchange, says she “likes to think about the future.” As someone from a Nigerian muslim family “who grew up in quite a racist part of Liverpool,” Jonah is inspired by movements like Afrofuturism, which has been described by curator Ingrid La Fleur “as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens.” Both women spoke on the panel Future international collaborations: future skills and future standards, moderated by Giuliana Ciancio & Carlotta Garlanda of the Italian cooperative Liv·in·g.
“When I teach arts management, I try to teach ways to hack the system for good,” says Rodrigues. She admits that her pedagogic approach “starts from a pessimistic standpoint, meaning that the systems are hard to change. The struggle is going to be hard, you’re going to find obstacles – I have no problem in making that narrative a starting point to develop skills.” Rodrigues says that, as a former manager working in the performing arts, she was trained to imagine a professional future for herself that was about “accumulating miles and countries and achieving things, not questioning them.” Explaining that her “perspective has now expanded,” which has also come with a “feeling of helplessness, because of our many polycrises,” Rodrigues describes her own emerging tendency to “second guess” her professional instincts. “I’ve become suspicious of my desire to travel,” she admits. Though she encourages cultural leaders to “assess where your practices are poor – at the ethical level, payment level, and ecological level,” she encourages her students not to overestimate their own political power, and social or environmental impact, as arts professionals. Rodrigues says she doesn’t buy into the idea “that such a fragile sector, a sector that’s dealing with a number of issues…is the same sector that is going to be champion of stopping climate change or the degradation of the biosphere.” She cautions against “the mistake of thinking you have a seat at the big table where those decisions, that could really impact what’s at stake, matter.”
Jonah, meanwhile, seems to prefer thinking about the future on a more manageable scale. “We can all be part of shifting things,” she says, “even if it’s only something small.” She describes being inspired by recent social movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and also being invigorated by the challenges of working on a recent international project with deaf artists who communicated in different sign language dialects. “I’m hopeful about language,” she says, though she thinks that “in the arts, we can do better.” Jonah also says that, as someone who used to be scared to make the daily trip between home and school, she thinks “about where I’m at now and how I’m comfortable to be in these kinds of spaces. That’s where my hope comes from, is that I can see that things can change.” She also advocates for “that invisible space of labour that doesn’t get valued,” particularly in financial terms. “We need to think about these things more deeply and meaningfully,” she insists, pointing out that “constantly worrying about money” is a significant barrier to professional development.
Rodrigues says she finds herself “less and less confident” about the possibility of “overcoming capitalist structures,” though she does cautiously wonder if universal basic income could be “a possible answer,” and hopes that wealthy countries will take the risk to start testing it out as both cultural policy and “a different way of organising society as a whole.” She also wonders how much the future should impact cultural policy making generally. “If you are in a position to influence or advocate for changes in culture policy, how much of your thinking should be informed by the needs of present generations and how much of it should be informed by the needs of those who haven’t been born yet?,” she asks. Though Rodrigues admits that she’s “not sure that’s the job or the role of a cultural policy maker,” she says playing with such questions “expands the temporality of cultural policies into a whole different horizon. So it’s not [only] about serving the current needs of existing artists and arts managers, it’s [also] thinking, ‘what about in 50 years or in 60 years?’.”
Take-Aways
Building on the ideas shared during the 2024 Cultural Mobility Forum, here are some propositions for building or revamping international professional development programmes for artists and culture workers:
- Consider what it could look like to develop an international approach without necessarily leaving your home country. How can artists and culture professionals better be supported to connect meaningfully with diaspora communities? How can cultural institutions learn from their peer organisations nationally and abroad that have successfully designed initiatives to identify and integrate newly arrived artists in exile?
- Develop an intentional strategy for internationalisation. What keeps artists and culture professionals in your context from knowing how to develop a specific plan for taking part of their work or practice beyond national borders?
- Consider language competencies as an important skill when developing internationally. How can artists and cultural professionals be better supported to articulate their cultural and aesthetic specificities to foreign institutions and audiences without “self-exoticising”?
- Use digital technologies when appropriate. What kinds of resources and skills might artists and culture professionals in your context need to gain access to or learn in order to reach those who cannot easily travel?
- Consider both the group and the individual. If you offer a collective approach to international professional development, how can you also make sure that people’s unique needs are being addressed?
- Have patience! How can you make sure that programme and project timelines take into account the often slow nature of building meaningful international and cross-cultural exchange?
- Facilitate peer-to-peer learning. How can institutions get “out of the way” and allow artists and cultural professionals from different countries to come together and figure out their own needs, wants, and solutions?
- Understand the impact of geopolitical history. How can participants in international development programmes be better prepared to confront the sometimes complex dynamics embedded in cross-cultural exchange?
- Do not assume that Western models are the best way of doing things. How can the sometimes more informal, community-driven ways of doing things in less resourced areas be valued and learned from? How can formal institutions in more privileged contexts un-learn certain habits and mindsets regarding what professional development looks like?
- Consider thinking about future generations as part of the skill set of developing an international practice. To what extent should the needs of people being born this decade inform decisions about cross-border mobility?
Check all resources and online panels of the Cultural Mobility Forum 2024 via this weblink.