As part of the 2009 Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival, we are hosting a joint event with The Centre for Policy Development, and in conjunction with the Eidos Institute, on the 26th of May at the Old School of Arts, 166 Ann Street, Brisbane – Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation. Our interactive public conversation will take place at 6pm.
Rsvp and bookings: Via Facebook (preferred) or contact Cate Gilpin at categilpin at gmail dot com or (m) 0411 562 103.
Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation
While literature about Creative Cities abounds, every city has its own urbanism and its own distinct culture. A ‘one size fits all’ model doesn’t map neatly onto the specificities of place. How can we rethink creativity collaboratively? What can we learn from Brisbane’s unique cultural wellsprings and how can we support a sustainable creative ecology?
BrisCulture and The Centre for Policy Development present an event bringing together academic, policy, curatorial and planning expertise to answer these questions and more. We hope to spark off a continuing conversation about how to ‘do’ creativity inclusively, innovatively and for the long term.
Speakers are cultural policy expert and 2020 Summit participant Marcus Westbury, festival curator Danielle Bentley, writer and urban consultant Linda Carroli, QUT researcher Jaz Choi and publisher, consultant and sociologist Mark Bahnisch. Our conversation will be chaired and facilitated by Bruce Muirhead. Join us at the Eidos Institute on Ann Street for what will be the start of an ongoing exploration of sustainable creative futures. Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation comprises an interactive panel discussion targeted at creative practitioners and urban professionals, and all who care about our collective urban cultures.
The Conversation
We aim to foster the art of public dialogue and make connections between people and ideas. So in the panel discussion, rather than a series of disconnected observations, each speaker will address a particular theme arising from their own expertise, practice and knowledge. We seek to articulate these themes to draw together a picture of where Creative Brisbane has been, is, and what we can become. Interactivity and connectivity are at the heart of our vision for BrisCulture. We will address the following topics – Creativity and the City, Curatorship, Cultural Policy, Community and Connectivity.
Policy, people and place
While Brisbane is now on the arts map with new cultural infrastructure capable of attracting visitors in the hundreds and thousands to major exhibitions and events, what of the sustainability of the city’s everyday lived cultural experience and production? Our town has proved its value in fostering distinctive and innovative forms of cultural practice – the germination of the music scene in the Valley or the arrival of grunge lit being notable moments in time. But much of this activity takes place ‘underground’ – it bubbles up alchemically from below; drawing energy from serendipitous connections and a sense of locale. Although we welcome the era of government support, public art and creative industries policy, we contend that embedding, celebrating and fostering emergent practice is a task still to be thought out.
There is a well worn track leading from Brisbane to destinations near and afar. There is a sense of irony in that we export our cultural practitioners and producers, and when they land among the bright lights of bigger cities, something unique in their work is pulled towards the mainstream. We believe that there are certain events, certain audiences, certain ways of being and doing that are possible in Brisbane and nowhere else. An exemplar is the Restrung Festival, curated by panel participant Danielle Bentley.
Much that is exciting and innovative happens in Brisbane everyday. Sometimes its development gains force precisely from having to work around obstacles. What we seek to achieve is the beginning of a collaborative conversation around not just how to make Brisbane culture more visible, but also more sustainable. Our city can be imagined as a network of overlapping circles – which sometimes meet only at the edges. The creative spark may shine brightest at the margins, but we’re missing something if we don’t better articulate the creative connections that already bind us all together around our shared experience of place and locale.
Community, city and play
We all imagine our city individually, but recombine those images collectively to make the town liveable, and to make it home. Cities have always been interwoven with creativity because of the productive tension between the vitality and speed of urban life and the spaces provided for reflection, contemplation and thought. Through these processes, culture is constantly being made and remade, even if it’s not named as such. But cities also contain borders between zones – and between collectivities. How can we create some more sinuous pathways, snaking their way through Brisbane like our River, which enable communities to come together and to reimagine their own diverse places in the greater whole?
Once again, we believe, and we will show, that citizens treat the city as a surface of play and self-expression, and that these cultures combine and converge across a much wider space than those designated cultural precincts. We need to recognise what is already occurring, and think creatively about how community can be lived in productive conjunction with culture, and that is another theme of our gathering, and our ongoing conversation.
Continuing the conversation
This event will only be the beginning – we’re conceiving BrisCulture as a rolling series of events, policy interventions, performances and conversations which exists in a virtual locale as well as in the spaces of the city. As part of next year’s CitySmart Innovation Festival, we’ll be programming and curating an event which ’shows’ in 2010 what we ‘tell’ in 2009. Over the course of the year, we’ll be hosting regular conversation events, some in conjunction with our partners: the Eidos Institute and The Centre for Policy Development. We’re aiming high; but our collective goals are realisable because we’re approaching BrisCulture as an exercise in making connections, creating networks, working in conjunction and fostering the art of public conversation and collaborative policy making.
