TRENCH TRENDS in CROSS-OVER FINANCING

TRENCH TRENDS in CROSS-OVER FINANCING Juan Pedregosa. Trànsit Projectes

Our name is TRÀNSIT PROJECTES and we are from Barcelona. We are about 250 people working in cultural projects. We mainly support local municipalities to implement cultural projects: the management of art production and community centres, production of events and shows, consultancy activities and International projects. We are always on the sharp edge that divides the provision of external cultural services from the creation and implementation of cultural projects. Our daily life is about complexity, multilevel political and geographical scales, interdisciplinarity, diversity, innovation, networks, financing, financing and, of course, financing.

The title of the panel is “cross over Financing” or most specifically: "Description des systèmes espagnols de financements culturels publics croisés au niveau des autorités " . The first thing I did was to ask my colleagues in Barcelona what was exactly “cross over financing” or “financement croisé”. No news about that, nobody knew about the terms or the issue. I asked then to a French friend and he explained the concept: mutual financing participation of public bodies in order to finance a common project. So, I understood this is the way how some consortia are financed in Spain, the consortia supporting the big National (Spanish or Catalan) infrastructures as, in the case of Barcelona, el Liceu (the Opera House), the Auditòrium, the Palau de la Música, the Teatre Lliure). My friend told me then that “financement croisé” in France is something less restrictive to these National operations but something more frequent, usual and closer to local cultural projects.

As you know, in the Spanish cultural system, cultural competencies are distributed onto different administration levels: State, Autonomous Government (regions), Provinces (Diputaciones), Councils and more. In this scheme, the State keeps some responsibilities (Spanish heritage, intellectual property, regulation on Media, national museums, libraries and archives) and the mandate to facilitate the communication amongst regions. At any moment, the word coordination is used. In the case of Catalonia, they are in charge of cultural heritage, cultural promotion, cultural industries, libraries, media, traditional culture and cultural cooperation. Only watching the list of competences it is not difficult to imagine that this political structure based in the concurrency creates interferences, duplication of structures and inefficiency.

Although

the only obligation is to provide library services in villages over 5000

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inhabitants for local structures, actually they have been main promoters in the development of cultural policies. But this relevance does not correspond with the transfer of resources coming from regional or national Governments. After years of promoting cultural premises and activities, local administration budgets are more oriented to the maintenance of infrastructures than to give answers to the real cultural needs, debates or expressions of society. If we talk about figures, The following table shows clearly the importance of local expenditure in culture in Spain (56,2 %), the second in Europe only after the United Kingdom (65,9).

2.In this administrative structure, normal practice is COFINANCING. But, what is cofinancing if you look at it from the trenches? Trenches is where we are: in some part fighting in the middle of major wars. That means that we, as the local councils culture departments, we are in the same battle for adding resources to new or existing projects. Local councils bid to the provinces and regions and the State, cultural promoters bid to local councils, provinces, regions and ministries, provinces bid to the ministries and ERDF and the European Social Fund and Regions bid also for the same decreasing money. As we havenʼt created other structures to manage the funding for culture and arts, the sad consequence is that the usual feeling of scarcity and insecurity of the cultural sector is the only thing that manages to perpetuate.

And the question is whatʼs new in this battle, what can be used as future possibilities to develop? Which “financing”schemes can fit better in the new crisis and postcrisis escenarii?

Obviously, this is the one million euro question and of course , I am not the right person to answer it. Our place is normally in the field amongst the public deciders and financers, the artists and cultural initiatives and the public and citizens. We try to balance the different perspectives and sensitivities in order to get things done. This is part of our job, but the other part is to assess each one of the parts of the cultural system to have a better dialogue with the other parts. As long as we are not researchers but practitioners, our example come from what we see, what we do or, in same cases, what we know by informed intuition.

So, concerning the cross over financing, I would prefer to examine the question not from the procedures but from the processes point of view. In other words, it can be more interesting to identify the trends of the creation of cultural projects locally in our area and after that, to examine the practical solutions given. Thatʼs the reason I called it trench trends: this is the place where we find them when they happen, in the field, making projects.

In my opinion, in relation to our Catalan context, there are four main trends whose consequences I will try to point out, concerning cross over financing.

I will use to illustrate these trends two projects with less than 5 years of existence: CAN XALANT, a Centre for artistic production in the city of Mataró and CITY LAB

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Cornellà, a center for social and digital innovation.

1.- Valuable outsourcing After years of debate between the virtues, functions and risks of public and private management,the solution for centres or projects is their management by private organisations. Public institutions are in charge of their planning and evaluation but private organisations, who are more agile, and closer to the needs of artists, citizens and projects , allow not only better quality standards but better access to new sources of financing or capacities for networking. This is the case of CAN XALANT, a private cultural institution runs the project who is partially cofinanced by the Mataró Council and the Culture Departement of Catalonia Government.

2.- Culture out of culture CITY LAB Cornellà is not a cultural center. It is a center for social and digital innovation. It is a Living Lab. It is allowing new processes of communication, learning and development amongst citizens, scientists, entrepreneurs and artists. CITY LAB projects are unconfessed obsessions of a lot of cultural managers that see how innovation can be a source of cultural and social development. That means at the end of the day that the centre is starting to create hybrid initiatives braking previous schemes on what is social, cultural, communal, local, global or sectorial. Irruption of new technologies in the cultural arena or vice versa, the irruption of cultural initiatives in the technology arena means also the openness to new financing frames and possibilities. Therefore, new actors can promote new cultural actions. In CITY LAB Cornellà, sources of financing come from the city, the province and the region but also from companies, Universities and Ministries other than culture.

3.- New centralities Each cultural project wants to be meaningful at home and attractive for the rest of the inhabitants in the area. As you know, Barcelona is a city of 1500000 habitants but it is the head of an extended and connected metropolitan area doubling this population.

There is a race in the different councils of the area to find niches of attention, promote new centralities and displace the powerful shadow of Barcelona. In these operations, alliance between local actors and the regional government is the key point to secure the viability of the proposals. In both cases, Can Xalant and City Lab, there is a double process of external approach (by the innovation of the activity according to the territory ) and internal legitimisation (inviting the population to participate actively in them).

4.- Networking and partnerships.

Coproduction, cofinancing, cooperation, collaboration and all the general uses of the prefix CO are in many cases an answer to the lack of money. The last one is coopetition.

Each one would like to promote without interferences their own projects but reality forces to new forms of project sharing. Managers multiply their contacts at home and abroad, projects promote their activities in social networks, artists and promoters try

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to introduce themselves in wider networks. Innovation comes from the contact and the exploration of new forms of survival (sorry, promotion of activities, projects and ideas) in the cultural sector and the only way to access the last financing source we have to try to get: the EU money.

CAN XALANT and CITY LAB have these ideas on their DNA, but this is not such a new thing. Whatever organisations or projects that are consistent are really aware of that. They know that formulae of cofinancing or cross over financing will depend of the adaptation capacity of the sector to the crisis situation, the understanding of new needs and demands and the new ways of production and distribution of culture and the openness to other sectors, realities and citizens. Alliance between cultural actors and local public administrations is now more necessary than ever. We are finally interdependent organisms sharing the same ecosystem and our survival depends on us.

Trenches are everywhere.

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