BrisCulture

One of the speakers at our Creative Brisbane event, Marcus Westbury, has recently begun writing a regular culture and cultural policy column for The Age. In a post on his blog this week, Marcus calls for crowdsourced ideas on:

non cash/funding related things that governments could do to help artists. Or even just areas where they should get out of the way?

Marcus writes that he has some in mind derived from his own experience with the Renew Newcastle project. [Incidentally, for those interested in the project's progress, the recent segment on the ABC's Sunday Arts can be viewed here.]

One of our themes at Creative Brisbane was the specificity of place and the need for policy and practice to be sensitive to particular local traditions, environments and cultural ecologies. It’s not difficult to think of examples where low cost initiatives – largely grass roots driven – made a huge difference to Brisbane’s creative scene. But what has worked in the past as an incubator doesn’t necessarily work to continue to facilitate sustainable culture making. I’m thinking here of the Valley music scene, but no doubt other instances could be cited.

There are some neat things happening in our town at the moment which exemplify the dynamic Marcus is talking about. The Red Chair Project in the CBD (on which I’ll be writing later as it develops further) seeks to revitalise town as a cultural place, and as a place for play, through selecting and paying emerging artists to stage multi-form performances in a range of locales. Much of the work that has enabled this project to get off the ground is the fairly unglamorous but necessary suite of tasks which underpin an ambitious aim – negotiating with retailers and building owners, working with Council and other local governance groups, and so on.

The hope is that the project will be a catalyst for something rich, enduring and growing; among other things, fostering a different notion of public art and the cultivation of audiences and the creation of shared cultures. The concept is not too dissimilar to Fête de la Musique Brisbane, but rather than being a festival, and rather than being devoted to one creative genre, it’s an ongoing and somewhat virtual project – a series of happenings across the CBD and the traces they leave in cyberspace and shifting attitudes. It’s a nice example of government working to facilitate grass roots activity, and through a process of snowballing and including, foster something which is a multiple of its individual components.

Incidentally, there are some great photos of Fête de la Musique Brisbane by Jo Bell of Brispop here.

One of our aims in BrisCulture, as I outlined at Creative Brisbane, is to foster a decentralised process of cultural policy making from the ground up. So I’d be really interested in suggestions which correspond to Marcus’ crowdsourcing call which are particular to Brisbane. Look forward to hearing what folks think, and I’d encourage people to leave comments here, as well as on Marcus’ blog should you wish to feed into his column composition!