The UK Government has now made the decision to end our country's relationship with the Creative Europe Programme, something which has awarded nearly £78.6 million to UK-based cultural organisations from 2014 to 2018, and has contributed greatly to employment, learning and development in the British cultural sector. Below is an open letter (orchestrated by Artsadmin) from over 700 artists and organisations across the UK to the Secretary of State, Rt Hon Oliver Dowden, protesting the damage and loss that this withdrawal will cause to our country and culture. International collaboration has always been fundamental to D6, and we will continue to work with our friends and neighbours abroad despite this decision.

To add your name please contact ArtsAdmin here:
www.artsadmin.co.uk/blog/372/open-letter-creative-europe

9 March 2020
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Dear Secretary of State, Rt Hon Oliver Dowden,

​It is with deep dismay, frustration and alarm that we note the UK Government’s decision not to renew and continue its relationship with the Creative Europe programme at the end of 2020. By ending our participation, the UK Government is erecting barriers to continued cultural exchange. Moreover, this decision makes no financial sense. It is well established that Creative Europe grants have delivered a net benefit back to the U.K. creative economy on both soft and hard measures (worth €74 million since 2014, benefitting 334 organisations), leveraging additional funding, helping to create employment. UK organisations in culture projects have more than doubled their Creative Europe grants from private sector sources, philanthropy and the public sector, generating over €20 million in match-funding while MEDIA beneficiaries in the UK have leveraged match-funding worth nearly €120m. The multilateral approach to transnational cooperation afforded by Creative Europe is irreplaceable.

It’s not just about the money. Creative Europe amplifies the UK arts and creative industries’ domestic market opportunity to one that is pan European from the outset. Ours is a sector that is growing fast in reaching audiences at home and internationally, with projects funded with UK partners set to reach 61 million audience members – with 7 million of those based in the UK. The Creative Europe Desk UK Impacts Report details many achievements that go beyond-the-financial, including how Creative Europe funding has enabled organisations to take risks, explore new business models and be innovative, for example in the exploration of new digital technologies.
The kind of cultural exchange, collaboration and innovation that Creative Europe facilitates can only be achieved through its unique international framework. For organisations who have participated in Creative Europe-funded networks, these projects give us essential and long-term funding, which in turn enables us to leverage further support, as well as a rich network of collaborators, touring opportunities and knowledge exchanges that enable us both to teach and learn.

This decision threatens an impoverished future for British creativity and sends the message that the UK is closing itself off to our nearest neighbours.

We implore the government to reconsider this decision and renew its commitment to Creative Europe for the benefit of our artists, audiences, and our creative economy.

Yours sincerely,

Róise Goan (Artistic Director), Deborah Chadbourn (Executive Director) and all the team at Artsadmin

​and the following signatories:

D6 has been working with the artist Henna Asikainen since 2016. This ongoing artist-producer relationship has evolved through a research residency, commissions, events and plenty of discussion around co-production and deep engagement between artist, producer and a broad yet transient community of participants.

In recognition of World Refugee Day 2019, Henna reflects upon her practice, cultural democracy and the latest iteration of her ongoing participatory project with newly arrived communities at the National Trust site, Wallington (Northumberland, UK).

Andrea, D6: To start, it may be interesting to re-introduce your practice and motivations around engagement and participation as a collective cultural inquiry, specifically with newly arrived communities and ethnically diverse groups in the region…

Henna: My principal interests as an artist are in questions surrounding landscape justice, migration and the human relationship with nature, and the complex social and ecological issues emerging from this relationship. These interests were, to some degree, already a part of my practice when I lived in Finland but have been brought into sharp focus by my own experiences as a migrant. Understanding what it means to be displaced from one cultural, social and ecological environment and then to establish a home in another, which is fundamentally different, has been the basis for the emergence of my recent projects.  These have combined aspects from my earlier practice - the site-specific elements for example - with an explicit exploration of the communal and social experiences of migrants and with the participation of those specifically with a refugee and asylum seeker background. 

It is often the case that refugees and asylum seekers are housed in the most deprived parts of a city and often in inadequate housing and with limited financial support. Effectively they are confined to the urban spaces in which they are housed by a lack of both economic and cultural resources. Means to access the rich natural and cultural environment of their new living environment is too often a rarity, closing down the opportunities of a common ground for a dialogue with the host community.  My recent participatory projects have sought to address this aspect of the migratory experience - a sense of being ‘out of place’ and alienated; searching for belonging and beginning to lay down roots through the discovery of environment, culture and natural landscape.

In my experience, this ability to access and experience landscape and nature provides an important psychological and emotive link between countries of origin and destination, even when they present very different characteristics. Finding my way into the countryside, experiencing the landscape and nature that surrounds this city (Newcastle) helped me to put down roots – to begin to feel at home.  My projects have been built around this experience and sharing what I have discovered about building a sense of belonging.

Andrea, D6: Thinking about natural and cultural heritage more widely, it begs the question ‘Who is it for’? What are the possibilities of artistic methods seeking to democratise shared environments such as cultural sites and natural spaces? How is this methodology applied within your projects?

Henna: Democracy is only democratic when people are able to access its processes and structures on equal terms. Education, experience and a mutually inclusive dialogue are a critical part of this preparation.  

Basically, these participatory art projects have been grounded in beginning this dialogue - they make opportunities to talk and share, to take meals together, to become friends in the context of the beautiful rural environments of the North East.  This has provided the participants with the means to step outside of their immediate location and to collectively explore what constitutes a sense of belonging in a different context. 

In these difficult times, the idea and experience of migration is of particular concern to creative and cultural practitioners whose home and work has always had an international dimension. Our cultures have never been more extended and accessible to people as technologies begin to break down the barriers to engagement and participation. Brexit and the deeply disturbing resurgence of xenophobic, populist and fascist ideologies, the policy of building barriers and closing borders makes it especially important to bring forth and highlight the positive impact of migration and for us to begin again to develop positive values based upon hospitality, friendship and neighbourliness. And although it is not a fashionable concept - too vague and unprofitable - we need to once again find that which is beautiful between us. To take beauty seriously. To make it political.

Reflecting on the nature of beauty, the Finnish philosopher and environmental aesthetician Yrjö Sepänmaa wrote, 

Beauty is not only a surface property, a matter of appearances, but the beauty of processes.

I think this is very much applicable to my previous participatory commissions produced by D6, Forage and Delicate Shuttle. It is political in the sense that it is made together by people. It is process driven in the sense that an approach that engages with and foregrounds the effects of shared environmental experiences and the possibilities of those as a means to build dialogue and friendships has been applied and evaluated and reassessed and reapplied.  That a commonality is emerging that is not culturally exclusive but makes a space for new voices and that recognises the positive contribution of these experiences and their saying. 

The beauty of this ongoing project reaches far beyond the notion of exhibition as a destination for art projects. Each and every person who was part of the work has brought to it their politics, their history, their culture and customs, their friendship and hospitality, to the places we visited, the walks and conversations we had, everything we encountered and shared together. This process draws an outline of human relationships and connects us all in the great task of protecting and appreciating that shared outline. It delineates what is possible.

Andrea, D6: Wallington was one of the earliest sites gifted to the National Trust by the Trevelyan family. In April, you facilitated a site visit there with over 30 participants who were mainly newly arrived individuals and families, currently residing in and around Newcastle. Co-hosted by National Trust staff, the group experienced the grounds and river walk in addition to the former home and art collections of the Trevelyans.

As part of these series of walks and visits to heritage sites, you gently interplay questions and observations around the consumption of a constructed British heritage versus the ‘undocumented’ heritage, instrinsic to the evolution of the site or place itself but so often hidden or downplayed as part of the narrative. You guide participants around these complexities through an open and personal response to each site.

Why Wallington this time around?

Henna: Wallington Hall is particularly interesting in its diverse collection of art and curiosities from around the world - a collection that represents colonialist sentiments - that presents the world as an object to be interrogated and owned. A fascinating series of paintings commissioned for Wallington by the Victorian artist, William Bell Scott reminds us of the diverse groups that have made the history of Britain and its engagement with the world.  The paintings show us that Britain’s history has been made at home and abroad. The people who made Britain have always been migrants - from those who first occupied the land after the last ice age to the North African and Dacian regiments of the Roman army who lived and walked on Hadrian’s Wall - to the idea of Britain as the workshop of the world in the industrial revolution and the expansion of military and cultural resources to enforce and build markets for the products of this workshop.  Wallington is a sort of cabinet of curiosities that exemplifies both that history and the development of an idea of the world as something to collect, encounter and categorise - to make elsewhere different and ‘exotic’ - foreign.

The National Trust is a national collection of ‘heritage environments’ that have come to exemplify this ‘Britishness’. This makes them interesting places to visit in themselves. They are also extraordinary and unique places, and stand in stark contrast to the often deprived and run-down environments that displaced people are sometimes housed in. The gardens are pristine and immaculately cared for. They are points of departure into escapism, in some cases into the fantasies of those who established them as temples to themselves and their ability to shape and contain nature.  These landscapes are steeped in history that often contains traces of the colonial past in botanical and architectural contexts. These traces are images of a selective and acceptable mode of migration and appropriation and can be found in the gardens and interiors – the careful construction of a quarantined past that excludes the inconvenient details.

It is a very powerful experience to visit these places with our diverse group and to think about what is being presented to us; how these spaces seem to be defined through who they are designed and kept for. The making of a space through an opposition to ‘the Other’, through the exclusion of minorities from these idealised landscapes presented as playgrounds for the ‘white’ and wealthy.  We can and must ask questions: How do these spaces position us? Which history is being told? Who owns this history? What does that tell us about our present and its own obsessive nostalgia for that which never was?

Andrea, D6: One of the things that struck me was a simply stated but profound reflection by an older participant from Syria as he showed me images on his mobile phone which he had taken at Wallington, “I never expected to be living in Britain. To be British”. His family are currently separated across three European countries, negotiating new identities. I was moved by this experience and exchange.

Henna: Yes. He reminds us that any of us can become a refugee at any time. You can never be sure what direction life takes. We are all immigrants of one kind or another separated only by historical time.  We need to remember this and locate it at the centre of our idea of belonging and, in remembering and thinking through our own journeys, we need to be hospitable to those who are, right now, engaged in a journey to make a home in a new place.  

#ThereisBeauty

For further information, please visit:  
Henna Asikainen - http://www.hennaasikainen.com

World Refugee Day - commemorating ‘the strength, courage and perseverance of millions of refugees’https://www.un.org/en/events/refugeeday/

Wallington - https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/wallington

Images: Wallington, April 2019 (Janina Sabaliauskaite)
​

As an organisation that works with artists across borders, being part of international networks is essential. Especially now.  With the political landscape so uncertain, and the UK's relationship with the rest of the world still unknown, we can draw on our network of friends and colleagues to safeguard and build our future.

In Ljubljana (SI), in early April we represented Res Artis at a meeting of Contemporary Dance Residencies which considered the value of residencies to cities. With a residency programme ourselves this global network of artist residencies reveals new practices and shared opportunities.

From the Europe Jazz Network that our new chair Ros Rigby has been part of, to our longstanding membership of Culture Action Europe promoting the value of culture at political levels, we join networks to create programme and share knowledge, but also to amplify our voices so that our sector can be heard.

D6 Director Clymene shares her thoughts on the importance of networks in the video below, when she was invited to take part in a panel discussion at the Barbican as part of CONNECT! Creative Europe Desk UK Forum on the Value of Networks last September. 

If you are an artist or represent an organisation, why not take a look at some of the European arts networks you could join here.

 
A couple or so years ago longstanding friends and colleagues - Carla Delfos (NL), Mercedes Giovanizzo (ES) and Chrissie Tiller (UK) came together to discuss women, leadership, power and diversity - referencing contemporaneous discussions across Europe and beyond. They are experts in their field and at the helm of pan-European networks, programmes and projects.
 
These were perhaps the kind of conversations that many of us have been having.  Yet they took it a step further pursuing the idea of a space to share, to think and ultimately, to influence:  A European network of women cultural leaders. 
 
In July 2018, D6 was invited to an inaugural meeting of HERstory at the Art Academy in Basel.  The event which took place over three days, brought together producers, artists, filmmakers, academics, public sector officers, politicians and cultural managers operating across Europe. A total of 45 influential women, representing 15 countries.  
 
What were these conversations reflecting?
Why in 2018 we should still be thinking about gender equality in the arts? 
What more could be said and what needed to be done?
 
Immediately, we could identify that the issues are procedural and they are measurable:
 
Equal pay in the UK has been the law for more than 40 years, yet in our sector, women are on average still paid less per hour than their male colleagues. Up to 40% less in commercial galleries and auction houses and up to 14% in our public museums and galleries. 

To this day, three of the oldest cultural institutions in Western world, the British Museum (est. 1753), the Louvre (est. 1793), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (est. 1870) have never had female directors.
 
In the centre of Basel, the hallowed halls of the impressive Kunstmuseum has collections and changing exhibitions. Yet on the floor showing the works of Jasper John, Claes Oldenburg and Jackson Pollock, not a single female artist was represented. “Why have there been no great women artists?”the feminist art historian, Linda Nochlin famously asked in her landmark 1971 essay. Her point was of course that there had been, but centuries of misogyny in the art world meant a lack of visibility and presentation in museum collections and exhibition programmes.
 
This imbalance remains not only in collections in established and publicly funded institutions, but research compiled by the Guardianover the last decade reveals that male artists made up 88% of solo shows at Gagosian 76% at White Cube and 83% at the Lisson Gallery.
 
These are issues of parity and equality that can be measured.  Perhaps quotas could be introduced, inequalities exposed and policies written. This is necessary.
 
But what of the culture that creates these conditions?  What of religion, of class, of commerce and the instruments of nation states? 
 
In a world dominated by a ‘growth is good’ agenda, we questioned where power lies and if these are the values that we want to live by.  We asked about leadership and where the space is for those who do take the risk and achieve creative success, but are rarely rewarded with a prestigious job title or a large pay packet?  Are the heads of institutions and ministries the leaders, or are these slow moving monoliths looking to others and those more likely to take a risk.  Who is the leader here? Where does this leave the artist or organisation whose work connects at a slower or deeper level?  
 
HERstory was an opportunity to explore what we could learn from one other. Our conversations were wide-ranging and cross-cutting from neo-liberalism to the economic crisis, from diversity to inclusion, from heritage to language.
 
As recent graduates, with a fighting spirit, D6’s (then ISIS Arts’) first exhibition in 1992 was for International Women’s Day.  In 2018 things are measurably better, and across the world policies protect, support and promote the rights of women.  
 
So why are these conversations still necessary?  
 
They are necessary because inequality still exists and will continue to do so unless we create a fairer, kinder and more equal society.  This is not just about the what, but also the how. From Serbia to Finland, we represented most of the countries of Europe, yet we did not represent the diversity of Europe.  Is this just about women? The answer is certainly no.
 
So, what next for HERstory?
 
We will continue to have and share these conversations.  Is it a movement, a network or a series of informal meetings?  Perhaps it’s too early to say.  Perhaps the structure is not what is important. 
 
Clymene Christoforou,
Director, D6
July 2018

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