International Virtual Conference
“Art Emergency Response Mechanisms: what can inspire us for the CC sector?’’
Cultural Funding Watch in partnership with Rambourg Foundation have joined with various parties of the Creative and Cultural sector around the world to gather their knowledge and experiences of best practices in the field, to debate and carry out an inquiry by putting into profit the technological and digital assets we have to communicate and connect in this time of physical disconnection, through an international virtual conference on March 20th.
Please, kindly note that :
* Everybody is welcomed to this conference
* We ask you to register to this link so we can share with you the link to the conference
* You may have to download Zoom, if you don't have it already
*The conference will be held in English
Under this once-in-a-century pandemic hitting the world economy, saddled with record levels of debt and followed by official government measure for enforced closure, hundreds of concerts, festivals and events have been cancelled and postponed in Tunisia and all around the world. Artists as independent workers, arts organizations dependent on gathering groups together, creative people engaged in travel and exchange, art technicians as the industry’s invisible hands and the whole ecosystem maybe especially affected. The sudden implosion of the cultural and creative sector has confronted us with a brutal reality and an urgent call for an industry emergency support, in order to help the mostvulnerablecreatives, workers and organisations stay afloat during the COVID-19 crisis.
The disaster has affected independent artists, companies large and small, from great cultural institutions to freelancers and small-businesses. In the past few weeks, emergency relief funds and other campaigns or online petitions to raise awareness on the massive impacts of the Corona virus on the arts and cultural sector have been created aiming to provide support and temporary financial assistance to members who are in need to help the culture sector withstand the crisis – yet it does not even begin to answer, in concrete terms, the many questions concerning the modalities, coordination and organization of such emergency support mechanisms: Do we have an estimation of the financial impact on our sector? Can it be measured? Should the supported beneficiary list be the result of a selection and if so, under what conditions? How can priority be assessed and how can we optimize funding distribution in order to save the maximum of actors?
What will we discuss
This virtual space aims to gather artists, cultural and creative workers, institutional representatives, funding initiators where they could share their best practices from previous experiences on how to mobilize funds, exchange their know-how in handling crisis; making a clear shift of our attention to how we can support artists and audiences, collaborators and comrades, ideas and work, through present platforms and programs.
The idea is to be a step ahead on an organizational level and find out how to best allocate our resources by asking the right questions. At first, a plenary will be conducted for information sharing on impact assessment. Speakers will share strategies and experiences in collecting data for needs assessement purposes and evidence based advocacy.
Following the plenary, the (virtual) attendees will be split in three groups of parallel workshops based on their affiliation. Each will explore their response mechanisms of actions and initiatives - what crisis action plan is put in place to compensate out-of-pocket artists and institutions, what keys they found are best to a successful plan, and what could make it defective.
Workshop1. Initiatives to take from an institutional perspective: strategies and public policies of governmental institutions.
Workshop2. Initiatives to take from the artistic and cultural community perspective: artists,
Workshop3. Initiatives to take from the private sector and foundations
What we hope to deliver beyond the conference is a network of united actors that will continue collaborating and building each other up by sharing what they do know best, making the sector as strong as possible when we come out the other side of the crisis. The distance between us is forming a space for new and “care-full” forms of listening and helping.