Community Culture

Ed Carroll Without help, without permission

In 2012, with research funding from Creative Europe, 15 artists and activists came together to explore the peculiar nature of community and culture, what Rosalyn Deutsche refers to as the experience of being public. Gatherings took place with local creative practitioners and community groups to feel the pulse of community culture in Cork, Belfast, Lower Sanciai in Kaunas and Afrikaanerwijk in Rotterdam.

In Ireland, what emerged was a Community Culture Strategy to revalue, renew, and reinvent community arts. It involved working from the person-up with leaders, artists, youth and community workers as well as from the top-down with institutional agents - arts and education officers who engaged with the field of community arts.

While community art disappeared in cultural policy it still had resonance in creative community platforms in Galway and Limerick. These groups shared the Strategy’s concern that “there are significant inequalities in the field of arts and culture (and that) a cultural rights perspective could help communities experiencing social exclusion.”

To garner investment of hearts and minds for the Strategy, a proposal by Blue Drum to set up an inter departmental working group was agreed and met 3 times with the Ministers and officials from the Department for Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht, the Minister and the Department for Children and Youth Affairs, as well as the newly formed TUSLA - the Child and Family Agency. While the Strategy was signed-off at a joint meeting of the Ministers in 2013, eventually funding (€60, 000) from the Department of Arts was refused.

Despite absence of funding a skeleton programme for the bottom up approach from within the community/ voluntary sector moved forward. The aims and objectives of the ‘Community Culture’ strategy was premised on acknowledging and realising the potential and resilience of community, rather than the deficit model of community as dysfunctional and a site for

oppressive relations. The programme had resulted in 2 strands that form a basis for the next stage i.e. a developmental platform and a learning platform.

A Developmental Platform pulled together artists and activists involved with the percolating energy of groups like Claiming Our Future’s Activist Camps and Creative Communities in Limerick and Galway. Blue Drum was a catalyst to connect these groups and together over a 3-year period produced 10 public events with up to 600 people attending. The platform now has a constituency of 200 creative practitioners from across the island of Ireland who imagine the creative potential of community art as a driver for civil society. It has produced a Charter for Cultural Rights, This is a first step to make real the ambition of the Council of Europe’s Faro Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2007) to ‘create cultural environments in which sustainable communities can thrive’.

A Learning Platform is also key and workshops helped to focus on cultural rights and

values as a way to transfer know‒how about a rights perspective and show-how to act as rights holders. The emergence of a dedicated Legacy web presence meant the chance to commission, to (re)assemble materials that critique and document the roots of community art.

What lies ahead is the emergence of a new model for communities in transition led by a bottom-up, self-organised group with a mandate to build capacity, to make the connections, to enjoy cooperation and to co-create. Vaclav Havel insight gives some clue to the timeframe: “Civil society is an intricately structured, very fragile, sometimes even slightly mysterious organism that grew for decades, if not centuries” .

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