VALÉRIE QUILEZ

“Giving artists more tools to promote themselves”

A little over two years since Luxembourg arts council Kultur | lx launched, Valérie Quilez explains how it helps artists expand their horizons and puts the grand duchy on the map.

As we emerge from the covid pandemic, more and more Luxembourg artists are again performing abroad. What sort of financial support does Kultur | lx provide for those artists? By far the most requested support is for mobility, for artists who are going to perform or for a work in circulation--an exhibition or a play, for example. We can finance transport and hotel and so on. We can also help with fees when needed. But basically, when our artists are invited on a tour or by a foreign venue, it’s very important that the partner institution engage in part of the financing. So we offer support, but we don’t fully finance the export.

We also have requests for mobility grants. They are smaller but enable artists to go abroad to take part in a conference or a festival just to network and make connections. This is a brand that we developed to enable artists to be more proactive in benchmarking what’s going on internationally.

Have we reached the stage where international festivals approach you for recommendations? To encourage foreign festivals to be curious about our artists and productions, we have started to be very active in terms of inviting professionals to Luxembourg. We are very aware of what’s going on in terms of programming here, so we can get people from abroad to see shows, meet artists and the directors of cultural institutions at an appropriate time. And when they get to see the quality of work and the process of the artists, they get an image of Luxembourg that doesn’t really exist abroad. This helps build a very enthusiastic and trustful relationship, so that when they are programming artists for a festival, they will naturally call Luxembourg.

Kultur | lx is a member of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies. Have any concrete examples of collaboration resulted from this? No real collaboration because we are the newcomers. But the meetings we have online help very much to see the various challenges that arts councils are facing in different countries. A lot of institutions have had to re-reflect on the way they were funding, supporting artists and acting internationally, within the pandemic.

You obviously work closely with your national promotion colleague, Diane Tobes… Yes. Basically, Diane looks at what’s happening inside the country, but we work on projects together--for example, giving artists more tools to promote themselves. You cannot act internationally without acting nationally.

Are there any exciting developments happening over the next 12 months that you can already tell us about? We are working on an international strategy for different territories. So we took advantage of the state visit to Portugal in May, when we took the directors of Luxembourg institutions to meet their Portuguese counterparts, to explore the possibility of more collaboration, co-productions and artist exchanges. We are going to do the same in Montreal in October when we take advantage of the Film Fund presence at Cinemania to present artist showcases over one day. But to make sure this is a sustainable visit, not just flying in and out for the showcase, we have two authors who will have residencies after Cinemania and a musician who has been invited to another festival. We are also taking over the organisation of the Luxembourg pavilion at the architecture biennale in Venice in 2023. And we have a new partnership for a playwriting residency for Ian De Toffoli at Francophonies en Limousin.

Valérie Quilez has been the international coordinator at Kultur | lx since February 2021.