Our values 1 | awareness

A reflection from founder Naomi Russell, at the end of a recent research trip and time working with (espa?o) agora now artistic networks in Belgrade.?

On my last day in Belgrade, my friend the theatre director and activist Andrej Nosov and I had brunch on the waterfront in Belgrade. He was just back from visiting his family in the South of Serbia. He shared how he heard on his visit that they have no interest in a new cultural centre in their town, they’d prefer a factory and a shopping centre. Material, tangible things that they believe will make a difference to their lives.

Later that afternoon I walked down Belgrade’s main shopping street Knez Mihailova. It was packed. On a Sunday! The day before on the recommendation of another local friend, the artist Sini?a Ili?, I visited the Museum of African Art which has a beautiful and unusual story compared to similar institutions in other countries. The collection exists as the result of gifts from African countries to the Yugoslavian Ambassador Zdravko Pe?ar and his wife Veda. This collection was neither stolen, nor extracted. I was the only person there save for a Mum playing outside in the gardens with her two young children.?

If the choice of a big shopping bag stuffed with cheap, badly made clothes by exploited workers from H+M trumps the ability to see and experience artefacts from another part of the world freely given on the basis of deep and genuine relationships then we have got a lot of work to do.? It got me thinking. What are we getting wrong? How do we bridge these extremes? Through our attention, I think, to real people, to real concerns. Where we build trust that, once gained, is not easily lost.

Building trust is a very important foundation to the making of (espa?o) agora now.? First in acknowledging the realities of too many wonderful independent artists working in the performance fields and the precarity of their existence. Second, to challenge ourselves as a community on what it means to cultivate authentic dialogue with communities as an integral part of our vision to open up residencies that focus on creativity as a process rather than simply an end artistic ‘product.’?

Awareness is the first of our five values. In Spanish the word is ‘conciencia’. Making this project has included a conscious act to gather artists and partners from different contexts around the world, with their own unique experiences and multiple perspectives and carefully explore what it would mean to act together. This is slow, vulnerable and hard work. It is uncomfortable. It means paying attention to the small things in different cultures. It means not only imagining but also experiencing what being part of a world community is. To experience how, even though we may be physically and contextually very distant, we are dependent on each other.?

It means resisting the way we normally function as part of the instrumentalised systems in which we all have been creating, touring and funding our work.?

On my last Friday of the trip, artists from the local Belgrade networks gathered. Two of them - Olga Kaeva and Nemanja Bo?kovi? - led a movement and body practice for those assembled. The first took place in the ULUS Pavilion and the second in the open space around Kalemegdan Fortress. I discovered afterward that several of those attending never speak to each other. This small act of moving together, practising awareness and finding common ground was a significant small step toward the making of (espa?o) agora now in Belgrade.?

If we cannot come together, we cannot act together. When underpinned by shared values, it makes for a stronger foundation on which we make this complex and ambitious project together and share it in the territories we inhabit.??

Our first publication gives perspectives from artists in our community on the value of awareness.

We’ll write more about the other 4 values in future posts. In the words of one of our UK artists, Chris Thorpe, "These values are in a dance with each other. Each is connected with the personal, the political and the economic. The balance between them is a constant choice and never static. They are there to help us create space not just for the art we make; they are values that underpin how we make it."

With thanks to Culture Moves Europe for supporting Naomi's trip with an individual producers mobility grant.