Let us introduce you to D6: Culture in Transit, the new name and identity for ISIS Arts. From now you will start to see changes in the way we present ourselves.  
 
This story is simple – our old name had become the news, and it was time for a change. We suspect you are not surprised.
 
With our friends and colleagues, we have looked again at the journeys we take with artists and partners to produce our projects and programmes. We have considered local and international communities and the connections we make between them.  We have reaffirmed our belief in the value of the arts in creating fairer, informed and more generous societies.
 
We wanted a name that would be easy to remember and work across cultures. (It resonated with us that D6 is the gate at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam that brings you in and out of our region).
 
We have chosen D6 as a portal to the rest of the world, where cultures meet and exchange and where artists and ideas come together to reveal our complex, surprising and interconnecting lives.
 
We are now D6: Culture in Transit. We hope you like it.

Dear Chi,
 
I’d like to tell you a little story.  We are a small arts organisation based in Charlotte Square in the city centre.  We have been creating projects connecting our city to European and international communities for over 25 years.
 
We have been more successful than most at bringing Creative Europe funds into the city and although we are not a large institution, nor a large employer, we are often in the position of promoting Newcastle as a cultural centre, presenting our programme at international conferences and events.  (In November I will speak on Brexit in Paris, at the Centre Culturel Irlandaise.  My 8th such presentation in the past 18 months. )
 
We know the value of culture in contributing to fairer, kinder and more confident neighbourhoods. We have made great connections all across Europe using art to bring people together.   Newcastle’s international cultural standing is stronger for it.
 
But I am worried.
 
Yesterday’s leaked report on the Tory plans for immigration is, I recognise, not policy, but it generated little response from the Opposition. I am immensely proud of our achievements, yet these proposals would be a disaster for us. Our artists, producers and colleagues flow seamlessly from European state to European state.  They are highly qualified and interesting individuals, yet we can rarely award long-term contracts.
 
I was pleased to finally hear Kier Starmer support the UK’s continued membership of the Single Market. It is vital for our survival. Now we need to hear of the value that free movement brings to our country. It’s not just about fruit pickers or bankers. The cultural sector needs free movement for artists and cultural producers or Britain’s thriving cultural world will slowly die.
 
We are already struggling with the negative press the UK is receiving across Europe, and the blustering jingoism of our chief negotiator further diminishes our reputation.
 
I’d like this story to continue as a story of hope, hope that Labour will show the leadership we need in these damaging times.  Hope that Labour will consider its domestic policy in a European context, where the work we do is as much about creating fairer, safer and more generous societies as it is about free trade. There is so much more to our relationship with the other 27 states than the lining of our pockets.
 
Arts and culture underpin our sense of identity and our understanding of each other, from music to television they reveal the hidden and celebrate what we share. Yet  we are so often overlooked in political debate. The arts play a vital part in our region’s profile in the world. Please help support our ability to keep cultural exchange alive.
 
 
Clymene Christoforou
Executive Director, ISIS Arts, Newcastle

Transcript

(Presented to an audience of artists, politicians and cultural managers at 'Beyond the Obvious' conference, Budapest January 2017)

On June 23rd 2016, 52% the British pubic, voted to leave the European Union.  A union we had been part of since 1973.
 
The successful Leave campaign offered voters an enchanting vision for our future: it offered us

• a Democratic Britain, 
• a Global Britain
• a Britain free from interference
• A Sovereign Britain
• It was going to make Britain Great again…

 
The Leave campaign offered us all this and more – we would protect our borders, save our national health service and take back control. 
 
During the lead up to the referendum ISIS Arts initiated a creative writing project with local partners asking young people what they thought about Europe - it was called ‘Should we Stay or Should we Go…?’ and I’d like to read a small poem written by a young woman, a teenager at the time in Newcastle. This is the 'Leave Campaign Manifesto' by Dani Watson….

Immigration, immigration!
A scourge upon our brilliant nation,
Can’t pay your rent?
That’s immigration!
Bad weather in Kent?
That’s immigration!
Can’t find a council house?
That’s immigration!
Got divorced from your spouse?
That’s immigration!
Can’t get your kids a school place?
That’s immigration!
Can’t find a parking space?
That’s immigration!
Did you read the Daily Mail?
200 million refugees are going to sail,
Here from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Kos!
And they’re going to turn Big Ben into a mosque!
Let’s make Britain great again!
Let’s bleach this multicultural stain!
British jobs for British workers!
No more migrants flipping burgers!
Nothing gives us more anxiety,
Than migrants contributing to our society!
Don’t let these faceless bureaucrats tell you what to do!
Let’s build a wall between us and the EU!
Who the hell needs democracy?
When we’ve got our own hypocrisy!
After all when it comes to immigration,
There’s no more reliable source of information
Than Nigel Farage and Boris bloody Johnson.

D.Watson
 
The leave campaign made an emotional connection to people with an appeal to nationalism.  The REMAIN campaign on the other hand failed make an emotional connection to the EU which would resonate with ordinary people…
 
Despite this, the vote was very close and showed how divided we had become:
 
In Scotland and Northern Ireland people voted to remain whilst England and Wales we voted to leave
 
Our Cities were in and our rural areas mostly out.
 
Our Younger people chose to stay, and our older people to Leave
 
Those on the left were more likely to vote to stay and those on the right were more likely to go
 
Our parliamentarians overwhelmingly supported a remain vote.  Yet their English constituencies overwhelmingly did not.
 
Last week our PM Theresa May outlined her principles for our European Divorce in a bid to save our fragmented islands. Her much awaited speech drew heavily on the need to unite our country … our country that had been now divided in two (or four or six or eight.)
 
Perhaps, unsurprisingly 96% of the creative sector supported REMAIN,
 
But I’d like to touch on a quick story about a town and its people that overwhelmingly DID vote to leave.  Blyth is a port in the  former coalfields of Northumberland,  a county which borders Scotland. In a county that has pockets of extraordinary wealth yet a town that has some of the most deprived neighbouroods in our country.
 
Once a thriving community whose shipyards built the worlds first aircraft carrier it has suffered from increasing economic decline and now has 20% youth unemployment , some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy with  24% of young people leaving school with no qualifications.  Unsurprising, Blyth has benefitted, more many, from EU structural funds…
 
This image here of a 8m€ workspace on the quayside…recently support by the EU to support business start ups.
 
Last summer as part of our large scale Creative Europe programme Corners we brought 25 artists and producers from across Europe to Blyth. These artists came, from Italy, The Basque Country, Ireland, Serbia, from Croatia from Sweden and from Kosovo.  The were artists, they were writers,  they were musicians, they were dancers.
 
The project drew threads between communities on the edge of Europe. The artists sought out stories that were shared and commissions were presented in unlikely public spaces.
 
Windows was an exercise in direct democracy and posed questions which were voted on by participants by moving to the pools of red or green light.  These questions were repeated in neighbourhoods across Europe and their results shared.  Artists asked the communities what question they would like to ask of their neighbours and these included the one you see here as well as ‘do you trust Politicians’,
 
Artists Valeria Simone, Michael Hanna and Asier Zabeleta.
 
Bridging the Silence was a audio walk set up on the quayside in Blyth telling and retelling stories that bridged the silence of those whose voices had been suppressed..
 
It focuses on representing the emotional journey survivors move through as they pass from the storm inside to peace. Crossing the bridge therefore becomes both a symbolic and literal reflection of this inner journey. The artists worked with groups and support workers to tell stories from domestic abuse survivors and shared similar stories from across Europe.  The Audio walk brought the stories together
 
Hrvoslava Brkušić, Croatian multimedia & sound artist; Deirdre Cartmill, N. Irish poet, and Beatriz Churruca, Basque visual artist & Performer.
 
We spent many months getting to know the people of Blyth bringing together  local politicians and youth groups, library users and survivors of domestic abuse. We worked with  mums and kids with dads and granddads. continuing to do so now.
 
We worked with local artists and those who would never step into a gallery or visit a theatre.
 
The residents were welcoming and generous, but their Europe was very far from the Europe we see here today.
 
In the Brexit vote Blyth is a portrait of a community in search of a brighter future, where the factors that that shape their lives were not within their control…
 
If Brexit can be seen as part of a fragmentation process taking place Europe then this fragmentation needs to be seen on many levels.
 
For Blyth it was local, national and, in this context, European.  It was between them and the big city, but also between north and south and between the UK and the rest of Europe.  It was between those who could make things happen and those who could not…
 
Yet this project showed that artists could find new and interesting ways to reveal stories and make at least some of those voices heard.  For some, perhaps for the first time…
 
In the lead up to the referendum, our then Justice secretary, Michael Gove announced Britain has had enough of experts telling us that the battle was a fight between ordinary people and the 'elites'.
 
This powerful message running through the Leave campaign spoke to those who had the least.
 
The question that we now need to ask ourselves as the culture sector is whether we are part of the problem or part of the solution.
 
Our sector has an extraordinary ability to bring together those who are different, to create spaces for shared experiences, to reveal stories that are hidden and to give voice to those who are silent.
 
It is up to us to choose how we make best use of these superpowers….


Clymene presented these thoughts at the Annual Pan European conference of Culture Action Europe in Budapest in late January 2017.

The nation has decided, our votes have been cast and the UK will be leaving the European Union. The winning side has presented us with a new future. That is democracy. The losers must now make the best of it and be kind to those whose choices were not our own. Yet the choice we were handed, a choice driven by political power play, was a simple binary choice, one that had no space for nuance or subtlety. Neither side recognised the cultural dimension nor the shared heritage at the heart of EU policy making.The remain voice in the arts was strong with 96% of the members of the Federation of Creative Industries for ‘remain’ for reasons of trade, free movement, regional support, sector specific funding and IP protection. Across the Channel Culture Action Europe called for its UK friends to continue to ‘help shape the European Project’.

Projects built on trust

Two days before the vote, ISIS Arts was in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana for a partners meeting with 20 or so cultural organisations and artists from Corners, a platform supported by a major Creative Europe grant to bring together artists and communities on the edges of Europe. Our British artists with their fellow European colleagues move freely between countries without visas or work permits – they can spend a few days or more, earn a few euros and move on to the next project. They can choose to sell their work without punitive trade tariffs and benefit from joint planning and practice across borders. Together we have all built a complex, enquiring project built on trust, mutual risk and above all a generosity of spirit.

We voted to remain because working collectively is better than working alone. Europe is better today because of this. Not only because there have been no wars between member states but because together we have made it greener and cleaner, we have invested in research, in development, in citizens rights and we have generously put in resources to share with those who need most.

Our place in Europe feels downgraded; our cultural ties loosened, our futures divergent. We hope that we can preserve as much of the spirit of collaboration and cultural cross-fertilization that has been the driving force of our continent and our union for so long.

Now on..

None of us know where we will be in 12 months and what kinds of deals we can strike. But we do know what there is to lose. Will what we get be better, fairer, kinder? 

As the rawness wears off we must strive to salvage what we can of what we had. So many of our cultural institutions and universities will be impacted by this and we must hold a Brexit government to account, monitoring the impact on cultural exchange and opportunities for development, and calling for replaced funding as we lose it.  
This is not what we wanted, But if we are to have two years of negotiations, it is crucial that these negotiations include the arts and culture and that our voices are collectively loud and strong.

This article was published in A-n.

Action and reaction, the art of politics and political art in Ukraine. Part three
​
40 years ago artist Volodymyr Pryadka completed work on a monumental series of mosaics on 6 buildings in Kiev. The residential apartment blocks, side by side, proudly present this, their best side, to residents and commuters on one of the wide boulevards spanning out from the city centre. The mosaics, crafted by a team of artists are vibrant examples of contemporaneous design, depicting scenes of workers’ endeavor and motherhood. Artworks so well crafted they have withstood many a bitter winter with its unforgiving frost.

40 years to the day we are standing on the pavement on Peremohy Avenue, the evenings are turning chilly and we have mulled wine in paper cups to keep us warm. In the setting sun, the colours of the mosaics still sing. Olga, who has lived across the road for many years tells me how lucky she is to open her curtains to see these mosaics every day. We are 50 or so people and Volodymyr, the only surviving artist is telling us his story. It is a story of pride, but it is also a story of sadness.

Behind him, 4 young artists are quietly digging a hole, placing a sign, and filling the hole with concrete. The sign on the grassy verge separating us from the six-lane trunk road, tells us about the mosaic across the road. The kind of sign, with a QR code, that we might see in any European city explaining the artwork in front of us.
But today, here in Kiev, this signage is a work of activism and the brainchild of artist Zhenya Molyar and Kiev based producers, CSM.

The mosaics, like other works of art in Kiev, have fallen foul of a new law. A law passed by President Poroshenko in April 2015 making recognition of the 1917-1991 Communist totalitarian regime in Ukraine a ‘criminal’ activity and outlawing Communist symbols and propaganda.

In addition to the renaming of streets and entire towns, this new legislation has meant the removal of sculptures, mosaics and architectural detail. The Peremohy mosaics are just one small example of soviet era works of art and design that are at risk because they contain symbols of Ukraine’s history.

These new laws have been widely questioned both nationally and internationally with claims that they contradict fundamental human rights including freedom of expression and assembly. There are calls for amendments to the law.

Meanwhile Zhenya along with other artists across the country are making their voices heard.

In 2015 Clymene took part in the British Council Canny Creative Fellowship in Kyiv, Ukraine.  The fellowship placed her with the Congress of Cultural Activists and CSM, Contemporary Arts Institute.  These blogs reflect her brief time embedded in the culture and politics of Ukraine. 

Action and reaction, the art of politics and political art in Ukraine. Part two

On my last evening I was taken by my hosts to a Jewish restaurant in Podil, a gentle neighbourhood of fading grandeur with restaurants, tree lined squares and a lively energy.

The busy market sells fruit and herbs and hand knitted socks, and the glitzy supermarket European biscuits and caviar. The British Council offices were just around the corner.

I asked for a local drink and they suggested I try vodka with horseradish – 38% proof with a fiery start and a textured end. Over a Jewish meze and our second small flask of vodka, the conversation turned to language and ethnicity.

We were 7 artists and producers of whom 6 were Ukrainian. They came from across this vast country and had studied both in Ukraine and abroad. Most had traveled widely and their English was near perfect. They were ethnically Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish and one had a Polish boyfriend. Their parentage was mixed and they still had friends in Crimea and Donetsk.

My few days in Kiev had already taught me that on the streets and in the houses, the offices, museums and galleries Russian and Ukrainian languages are interchangeable. There are no signals, at least to the outsider, that one or other of the languages will be spoken and there is a quiet expectation that you will understand both.

I heard for the second time this trip, that the war in Donbass was not an “ethnic issue” – it was a “Russia issue”, and that the divide between people was not a division of ethnicity, but a division caused by politics and Russian expansionism.
My new friends were born in Soviet times. In the world of their youth to get ahead you became first a Pioneer, then a Komsomol, and only then would you have access to the benefits of the party. In their schools they were taught about Soviet culture in Russian, and Ukrainian writers were celebrated as talented Soviets. Indeed the glorious socialist realist murals in the 1956 Expocenter depict Ukrainian endeavor as second only to Russia herself.

It took the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s for Ukraine to become an independent county. What’s followed was the Ukrainisation of Ukraine where the official language became Ukrainian, the colours of the flag became widely visible in public life and new business and political leaders  attempted to redefine the country’s soul.

In schools, in today’s Ukraine, Russian books have stopped being taught as national texts and are taught instead as foreign literature alongside other international authors in translation. My colleagues’ opposing views rolled back and forth across the table…

‘Is it not right for Ukrainian children to learn in Ukrainian?” ‘But surely any literature is best read its original text? “ “Did I not understand that if you go to a bookshop, even today, most books will be in Russian?” “Yes but what would be lost if all children just spoke Ukrainian, will it not make our children more insular?” ‘But surely we need a period when we break the hegemony of the Russian language?” “But if that happens, are we not just throwing away a given multiculturalism which will, in the long run, make us stronger.” ‘This should not be an argument. We should appreciate the art and not restrict our access to it for political purposes.”
​
As I sipped my vodka I felt honored to be part of these conversations and privileged to have the opportunity to come back to spend more time with these new friends…

In 2015 Clymene took part in the British Council Canny Creative Fellowship in Kyiv, Ukraine. The fellowship placed her with the Congress of Cultural Activists and CSM, Contemporary Arts Institute. These blogs reflect her brief time embedded in the culture and politics of Ukraine.

Action and reaction, the art of politics and political art in Ukraine. Part one

Kateryna Radchenko is an artist and curator living in Odessa, whose work reveals unheard, forgotten or forbidden stories. Her exhibitions and projects often take place in unusual places, and she regularly works with photo archives to explore Ukrainian history, religion, and political storytelling.

We met for coffee in the café of the shiny international hotel chain the British Council had booked for this visit to Ukraine, and she told me her story:

On the 21st of November 2013 Kateryna was passing through Kiev en route home. She had intended to see friends and stay just one night, but she found herself unable to leave. Kateryna remained in Kiev, and in and around the Maidan Nezalesnosti (Independence Square), for two months.

The Maidan revolution is credited as starting with a Facebook message sent by Mustafa Nayem, a journalist from Afghanistan living in Kiev. Mustafa was in the parliament reporting on the president’s signing of an agreement that would bring Ukraine closer to the European Union. President Yanukovych had lost the faith of many Ukrainians with his brutal and overbearing pressure on political opponents, journalists and protesters, but the prospect of this agreement had signaled new hope.

When it became clear that the president would not sign the agreement, social media erupted with angry disappointment and Mustafa responded with: “come on guys, let’s be serious. If you really want to do something don’t just ‘like’ this post, write that you are ready and we can try to start something…”

By the time Kateryna arrived at the Maidan the numbers were swelling, and by nightfall at least 1000 people had gathered. During the next few days her friends and colleagues traveled from across Ukraine to show their support, taking shifts to sleep on the floor of her room. Through Facebook the world learnt of the violence and the first deaths, and the need for supplies for the wounded, the hungry, and the protest itself. Describing the makeshift hospital and media hub Kateryna said. ‘Now we were not just artists, now we were activists, we were journalists, we were medics.”

When the police started to use tear gas on the protesters, a call came for milk and lemons to counteract its effect. Kateryna sent out a Facebook message that she’d go and buy some and called for others to do the same. Within moments ‘the wife of an oligarch’ in her SUV picked her up, with a car full of supplies. She dropped Kateryna off at Maidan with the lemons and milk and returned to do the same again. Maidan was now a protest of the many.
Over the bitter winter months the occupation of Maidan continued with the loss of 130 lives, most of them civilian protesters. As artists became activists, so activists became artists, making sculptures, posters, banners, and films to tell the world what was happening. Yanukovych would step down and a new phase in Ukraine’s self-governing history would begin.
​
Kateryna has an exhibition at the Museum of Religion, Lviv in October 2015. http://www.museum.lviv.ua/

In 2015 Clymene took part in the British Council Canny Creative Fellowship in Kyiv, Ukraine. The fellowship placed her with the Congress of Cultural Activists and CSM, Contemporary Arts Institute. These blogs reflect her brief time embedded in the culture and politics of Ukraine.