It seems that whomever works in arts and culture – at one point – will come up with a name for an institution, art collective, project or event title…that will induce an episode of teeth crunching and tongue-twisting. So too the new fund brought to life by HIVOS, DOEN Foundation, and MONDRIAAN Foundation: Arts Collaboratory. Too strong on the R and the L side of the alphabet, if you ask me, but of course the sub-text spells all the right and politically correct lingo on collaboration, sharing and exchange with emerging regions.

I attended the well-visited launch/info meeting last Thursday in Amsterdam, where the incredibly entertaining host Tarik Yousif zapped us in 1 hour through over 10 presentations, and then presided over an hour of speed dating with several artist initiatives. Let me recap in a tiny nutshell what this fund is all about. It basically promotes and supports visual arts projects and initiatives from Africa, Latin America and Asia in order to increase the quality and diversification of their production, broaden the knowledge base amongst peers, and encourage collaboration with partners in The Netherlands. There are 3 focal points:
- Cultural entrepeneurship
- Knowledge sharing
- Dutch exchange

To my knowledge “cultural entrepeneurship” is very much a Dutch obsession. Mind you, it sounds worse in Dutch: “cultureel ondernemerschap”: enough to cause a bad rash. It is all about professionalizing (which is not a bad thing), marketing (which at times is questionable) and partaking within a market economy (here again: how and what, and at what price). A few years ago “cultural entrepeneurship” was all the rage in policy papers, and artistic production was qualified and quantified in marketing terms. It was heavily criticized at the time, so it is somewhat surprising to see the concept pop up again. Perhaps now that the Dutch are done with it, it can be exported to other countries? Don’t get me wrong: I am the first person to assert that arts and culture are part of economies and markets, and that organizations need to professionalise in some way or other: what the latter means though, is extremely context-sensitive, and which forms of (alternative) institutionalization (or not) are needed for a particular arts scene is ideally not something to be (pre)described by a government or other policy bodies, but should be generated from the bottom-up. The term is misleading because it has a nasty commercial – if not capitalist - ring to it.

Knowledge exchange is always a good thing: cannot argue with that one. In effect, some interesting and urgent questions are raised on the website: such as “Can and should an artistic work or project reach an effect outside its own realm?”. In other words, it reacts to the plethora of community and social projects which have been initiated by artists and art venues, which often show an imbalance between artistic quality and social impact.

Finally there’s the Dutch exchange part, which encourages art initiatives from Africa, Asia and Latin America to collaborate with Dutch partners. Kudos to arts collaboratory for not using the depleted term of ‘inter-cultural dialogue”, but rather prioritising the artistic outcome of collaborative projects.

The whole presentation round was so speedy that I didn’t get the opportunity to ask how and on which terms the participating organizations got integrated within the network, nor what their policy was – if at all - on projects with the Middle East. To my surprise there were no representatives at all from that region. It is not too unusual that the Mid-East features as a blind spot when cultural/humanitarian organizations join forces. The emphasis still remains Asia, Latin-America and anything south of North Africa. Surprising really, considering the infatuation on the one hand for arts (and other problems) from that region, and the degree of Islamophobia plaguing popular and political discourses on the other hand. This might be a malicious observation but perhaps it is always easier to work with “safe” others?

What binds many of the participating organizations together in thematic approach – from Nicaragua to Kyrgyzstan - is reflection on public space and urban dynamics. Agreed, this is an overall trend within the art world: there seems to be much emphasis lately on trying to unravel the urban fabric, and how citizens live and move within its convoluted constellations. So it is not surprising this forms a fertile matrix for critical artistic research and experiment. Whereas 10 years ago the forefront of critical theory lay elsewhere, now it seems to be found within urbanism and architecture….urbanists and architects seem to be heralded the unabated mappers of the real.