 Good evening everyone and welcome, welcome to this great launch book launch event. The book as you all know of course is called Creativity Ask a Modity, behind the independent cloche cultural scenes. The book was written by Miki Branište. We all love Miki obviously. For those very few of you who do not know Miki Branište, I will tell you that she is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Theatre. She's a curator, a cultural manager. She's a member of the board of directors of the paintbrush factory in Cloche and for many years she was the organizer of the Tondimeš Festival. I will give her the floor a bit later. I'm not going to overtake the mic but I would like to see a few introductory words about how we're going to organize this event. Following Miki's intervention, we're going to listen to a few presentations by our guests. Our guests are Mirona Runkan, professor at the Faculty of Theatre and Film, just like Miki, Eugen Ponescu, architect and urban planner. We also have Lela Paneid, who's an urban anthropologist and who's also part of the Collective A Association, those of you who live in Cloche, already know her from her project in Monastur and then we have Konal Ban, associate professor of international political economy from Copenhagen Business School and Lauren Maksim, who's a theatre director and general manager of Transit Foundation. Today's event is taking place at Transit House and is part of a series of events where we're celebrating 25 years of this space. Many happy returns, hopefully. So, creativity. We are all creatives, for sure. This sounds ideal but maybe it's not as ideal as it sounds like. Maybe it's not the best thing to all be creative and make money out of being creative. Among other things, Miki's book tackles this point as well, as well as many other phenomena that have happened in Cloche, cultural-wise, arts-wise in Cloche. Miki, you have the floor. Good evening. Thank you very much, one of all, for this introduction, for these kind words. Thank you for your trust. I will very briefly tell you about how I got to... Excuse me. I'm just slightly nervous. This wasn't staged. So, I will briefly talk to you about this book, which is the result of a PhD thesis. Mrs. Runkan here was my coordinator. He started in 2018. Basically, I started with feelings, unpleasant feelings and sensations that I could feel in the city. They wouldn't let go of me and I really wanted to go deeper and see what they meant. I was under the impression that many things were changing. Urban planning-wise, work-wise, especially in the cultural field. For several months, I was a bit of a lazybones. I started reading, but not so much. And then at some point, there was an event. And this event was the trigger for a very thorough study, namely the fact that we lost our paintbrush factory inclusion. When you write a PhD thesis, you first of all read studies about the topic. I did. I took the other way around. I started with a case study, with a paintbrush factory case study. I wanted to see what the conditions were for this independent cultural space to pop-up inclusion. And finally, what the changes were that led to the atomizing of the community and to our losing the space. In order to understand these things much better, of course, I had to delve deeply into several theories. The theories ranged from cultural policies to urban renewal policies. And all the way to studies about creative industries, creative cities, creative classes, and so on and so forth. What I've noticed in these studies was how the reasons why the state encourages or doesn't encourage culture change. And in fact, it's also about the access to culture. That's the main topic. And I believe one effect would be the changes in EU policies that start off from seeing culture with a high social value and then seeing it as having a high economic value. So I wanted to see how this change happens and what the reasons for the change are. We're also talking about the 2008 economic crisis. This crisis led the EU cultural projects to be more attuned to the economy. Most of the argument within Creative Europe saw culture as an element that supports the cultural development of the EU member states as a contributor to the GDP. There are so many influences on our jobs as cultural actors. We used to be called cultural managers, but now within the EU program that in the meantime has been improved with new priorities, we were simulated to become a cultural entrepreneur, in fact. And that is deeply rooted in the economic value that the culture has been assigned. The EU's argument is to connect culture, the competitive advantage and so on. We, of course, access EU funds. We take on the language that the EU uses and we propagate basically the same language. Many applications I have read show that the business language has permeated into the language of cultural actors. However, what I do believe is very important, something we should pay attention to apart from these intrusions, would be the fact that we no longer speak of diverse policies. We speak of a dominant vision, a main vision, that also includes the economic and economic areas. And this lack of distinction creates tension between the two sides. And we can see this within the cultural sector. It's important to say this because a uniform speech will lead to a very conservative approach. And the non-locrative area of the cultural sector will no longer be able to survive as long as it doesn't make profit. As an evaluator, I can say that there are more companies, in fact, instead of associations and NGOs. So this means that there is a whole shift from non-profit organizations, which are generally connected to the democratic value of culture, towards small companies, small enterprises that are very much related to the economic value of culture. This was just an overview. I have also delved into the brief history of the independent cultural space at large in Romania. I was interested, especially in Cluj, I wanted to see what other organizations there were in Cluj before the paintbrush factory and what their stake was at the time. We, as a generator of calorists and curators, we were connected to the values of the first independent workers in Cluj, independent cultural workers in Cluj. And I'm really happy to be able to see tonight so many people who were our mentors. Casa Transit, the place we're in, the Transit house, where we are nowadays, was also part of this, I was here 20 years ago. I can see representatives from Ithea as well. So I can see that there are still connections to this past. Within this study dedicated to the independent cultural scene and to its brief history, I was particularly interested in the stakes and attitudes of the independent workers in culture, their relationship with the state, with the sponsors, and their relationship, well, in fact, their status as employee. All these elements have become factors in the analysis I have at the end of the book in brief. I have basically studied four generations of cultural workers. There are five or six nowadays. These are fundamental, there are fundamental events to the cultural scene in Romania. One of them is the economic crisis in 2008. Another one would be the 2013 protests for Rociamontano against the gold mine. The artist's inclusion was very well connected to the protest back then. In an attempt to erase the differences between the non-profit and for-profit bits of the cultural scene, there is another attempt to blur the line between what's public and what's private. And here, again, it's very important to know what kind of culture we disseminate, what kind of culture we create, whether we're interested in there being public good kind of culture. For this, we need the state's intervention, obviously, because the state is the one that can ensure a structure, a structural context for the public to be able to access culture. In trying to define what independent means, independent space, independent artist, I realized that there are so many factors to take into account. So it would be important to find a different paradigm, a different paradigm that would better correspond to the present time. So my proposal is for the future to talk about a paradigm of interdependence. I have one more minute and I would like to say in conclusion something about, I would like to say about the tension between the for-profit and non-for-profit sides of the cultural scene. We could see that struggle within the paintbrush factory here in Cluj as well. From my perspective, this tension is one of the reasons why the community fell apart. We lost the paintbrush factory and that was one of the reasons that eventually, after two years, led to the vanishing of the project and some of our colleagues just went to other spaces, smaller spaces that are not necessarily connected to each other. Some of them still maintain contact but we no longer have that communal spirit and that was simply because we were sharing the same space. So it's really important to have your own space where you can create connections and generate contact. I would like to say one more thing, namely about the local effects of the paradigm of culture and creativity. That is what I tackle in my last chapter. Of course we can talk about gentrification, we can talk about the festivalization of the city of Cluj, these are two of the main issues. What do I mean by festivalization? Through festivalization, the cultural cycle which is made up of four stages only focuses on one of the stages, which is dissemination and that helps the intermediaries, the middlemen and not the producers or the artists in the cultural scene. As a general conclusion, in a nutshell, the paradigm of creativity, we do call it the paradigm of creativity, however this does not support artists, it doesn't support creative people. It creates a competitive advantage for those people who have spaces or for those who finance the projects of artists. It generally benefits those people who already have the necessary capital, a capital that the artists not necessarily have. However, all is not lost. Maybe we can tackle this conclusion during the debate. Thank you. Good evening. I would like to thank our hosts for welcoming us so warmly in such a beautiful context. They are celebrating 25 years of existence, 25 years of transit house. Yes, 25 years ago you were in kindergarten, we get it. I remember that 25 years ago I heard about this space in Cluj at the time I was living in Bucharest and I heard about this transit house during an interval theater festival and I heard this from Radu Afrim. He was so happy and he said, you know, this amazing thing is happening in Cluj and I think he was one of the first people to have one of his first shows here in Casa Transit House. Let's brag a little bit later on. Yes, this is a happy celebration, a happy year for me at least. It's not often that we see the launch of three books during the same year, three books that rest on PhD thesis that are very important. This is a reason to be celebrating and something to be proud of. In spring the first Romanian monography by Janu Janovich was published. Delia Yenedi who wrote the book can only be proud of that and I'm also proud of it because I really wanted this monography to be published. I really wanted this PhD thesis to be written. The second book launched this year is the one we're talking about tonight. I will go into more details about this one and there's another book that will be launched in Bucharest next week published by a former researcher and that book is dedicated to... In fact, it is a book of the theatrical aspect of the celebrations on the 23rd of August and it's a very compelling book, please trust me. But going back to our book launched tonight, I am really happy that this book is being launched and I would invite those of you who can to write about this book because it is an extraordinary book. It is a scientific study and at the same time it is also a manifesto that we've been needing for so long. This book puts things into a 3D perspective. It shows crystal clear what pragmaticians were saying at the end of the 20th century so words give life and create life. Concepts are not just code. Some of them produce effects in our daily lives even if we don't realise it at first sight. The book proves that in Romania, but not only in Romania, but it proves that in Romania and in Cluj, a shift has happened. I'm talking about a political shift. This shift comes from the EU's obsession of believing that the grass is greener on the other side of the pond. So we borrowed this very soft concept of creativity. It's a very nice, soft, cute little concept, isn't it? Then we try to introduce this concept of creativity in our education. We try to convince all the relevant forum that young people need to develop their creativity because creativity will develop people's thinking, people's identities and the capacity for free thinking. So it's a nice and decent word. It does no harm. That said, we have to be careful how we use it. What this wonderful book written by Miki Branis that demonstrates is that that, furtively, this concept of creativity has acted as a mask. It has acted as a mask that helped to commodify the cultural act. Along the lines of laissez-faire, culture has to produce money and has to survive by producing money, which replaces another political concept, another political concept that is much more deeply related to us. This is something we've only aspired to over the past 30 years because we haven't really implemented cultural policies, cultural policies in Romania. We haven't even outlined them. So this concept I'm talking about was culture as a public good, as a public service. This is something we would have needed with wasted 30 years and we haven't managed to convince any of the governments that the act of culture is a public service, a public good, that it is something that comes to the benefit of people. This is not just a flight of fancy. So this book we are talking about tonight clearly demonstrates the whole process of commodifying culture. And that comes to replace authentic culture and comes to the detriment of the beneficiaries who need culture. The beneficiaries of the cultural act don't always know they need culture. But they do find out that they need it if they are immersed in culture one way or another. If this act of culture somehow touches their personal life. But this is the realm of public policy. If we replace public policies with festivals like Untold, then huge festivals will produce a lot of money. It's true. But the same money that is produced will be used for products that have no connection whatsoever to the space where the festival takes place. In general, those services, those products have no connection to the final beneficiary. Usually people in Cluj just move away from the city when the festival takes place. They go to their grandparents, people go on a holiday, people go away from Cluj just to avoid the huge festival. So the beneficiary does not benefit from culture, the beneficiary benefits from entertainment. Hence this confusion which is supported between cultural communication and entertainment, strictly speaking. Of course culture has its entertaining dimension as well. But Miki Puranishthe manages to demonstrate that there is just uniformity due to this festivalization. That there is a loss of identity. Cultural artists and cultural managers eventually go bankrupt. Apart from this, what happens is that ordinary citizens are deprived of their fundamental rights to benefit from public services and public goods. I would like to congratulate Miki Puranishthe for being pointing this idea in her book. Because from my perspective and as I see things, this book is the most important, in fact, publication over the past 10 years in the cultural scene. Good evening. The 25 years have been important for me as well. The 25 years are slightly more than half of my active life. I don't think I've seen this room full in more than three years. I think it's a privilege for us to be able to be here and debate about a book. A book that mentions so many people who are in the room tonight. I think it's a great joy and a privilege for us to be able to debate this topic and this book here in person. This book will be long-lived for sure. It is worth reading and rereading. Because every time we read it, we will notice new nuances, new analysis, data, annexes and also memories. Memories that many of us hold, as well as connections between events that we maybe didn't make at the time or connections that we have forgotten in the meantime. And I think Miki's book manages to bring all of these together. And she brings all of these together in a way that shows us how the city has come to the point where it is today. It has become a model for other cities as well. This is not just a book about Kulushna Boka. It is a book about the country. It is a book about the doors parallel to other countries as well. But basically it depicts how Kulushna Boka has managed to carry on individually. This is a feeling my friends and I have with think about how the city relates to the state and this is something we can find in the book. My friends and I have been talking about the relationship between culture and the state. More often than not, this relationship is inexistent and many times it doesn't function very well. I want us to forget that the discussions found in the book started back in the 90s when the mayor of the town was Gjörgy Funar. For sure at the time the independent scene was very poor at the time. And Casa Transit, the transit house was one of the main places where things happen culturally. Please excuse me if I haven't mentioned the other exceptions. This infrastructure which was just one point managed to create ripples around it and so many other initiatives were drawn to this base and then were created through this base. As for the analysis of the book and the chapters I managed to read I would like to thank Miki, I got the book in advance. I should be talking about space as an urban planner and as an architect. Someone was looking at me when people mentioned spaces and urban spaces. And I think I can do that, I can talk about space. It's highly important to realize that the cultural phenomena taking place in Cluj and in other cities are very deeply related positively and negatively to access to spaces. This is a debate, this is a non-going debate. We had such a debate last week on Trajan Street in Cluj. We noticed migrations of small initiatives looking for space. This is just a tiny bit of the discussion but I think this is a hurdle because we need access to spaces and we need to be able to maintain spaces. Spaces that are not institutions. I think that access to these spaces is also blocked. It's much better and easier when spaces manage to generate services and cultural products that are valuable and well-known enough and acknowledged internationally because then that institutional, that space is part of the basically business card of the city. But we should also support and maintain the smaller initiatives not just the ones that are already well-known. There are so many tiny spaces where we can see cultural events happening that we need to maintain and support. And I think we as individuals and together we should find a way of constructive conflict because without this kind of constructive conflict we won't be able to come out of the spiral that the book describes. This is very clear in the conclusions of the book because there is an open end to the discussion in the book as well. I didn't expect the book to come up with solutions but I do believe that it's in our power and we need it in our hands to come up with solutions. We're really interested to have such initiatives. The paintbrush factory is gone, the transit house is facing problems and other spaces as well. So there's always insecurity and there's always a struggle with such spaces and this is catastrophic for a city that boasts the vitality of its culture. I find this petrifying not to mention the state of cultural institutions. So I think that very quickly we need to come up with answers to questions such as what do we do, how do we do it and to do so quickly as long as we still have people to talk to and creative people to create with. I feel very accountable and responsible and I'm very willing to talk to anyone to come up with a solution that is legal, obviously, desirable as well and I think we should talk about approaches, European projects, national recovery projects and so on. But I think there's no more time to be wasted. The book makes a distinction between festivals and other kinds of production. I think that festivals are also important and have their own role and we shouldn't come up with an opposition between creation and permanent production and festivals. We shouldn't oppose the two. Even festivals might face struggles. I'm sure there are solutions at hand. Some of them are quite easily reachable, others are more complicated but I believe that the role of the national and local authorities is not to become space owners although I wouldn't oppose that so there wouldn't be their role. Their role would be to maintain to manage the spaces. They are not the facilitator, they are not a marketing agent. They should ensure that cultural events can happen. We have such models all throughout Europe. A few weeks ago I went to Portugal and I spoke to an association that owned an industrial building. It was like a warehouse. In fact they were renting the space from the town hall and the town hall was renting it from the Ministry of Defence for a period of 50 years. The city hall was just the middleman. It wasn't investing anything, it wasn't doing anything. It was just the facilitator in fact between the state and this cultural initiative. Otherwise we won't be able to get out of this situation. We won't be able to escape it. We can see so many spaces going out in ashes. We don't need to blame other initiatives or festivals because the city is made to be used to be recycled, reused, repurposed but that makes things become ephemeral and too fragile and if authorities do not take on this responsibility their role and do not become accountable we're going to face this kind of fragility. I would really like to talk about this to all of you. It would be great to have group talks, different group talks to see how Cluj can become a model again and come out of this very fragile situation that followed a wonderful situation which was a pioneering situation before the current one. I think we should come back to that favourable cycle and come up with solutions for Romania that are new to Romania, maybe not so new to Europe but solutions that will help us come out of this situation that is a bit chilling for us. And I think we can do this. I think it's possible. I will stop here for the moment. It's been about 25 years since I graduated the faculty of tattoo film because I moved from Cluj, I've started becoming nostalgic. I won't talk too much because I prefer more of a debate at the end of the world community here in a sense I get better feeling from Tandi Marj at the beginning of the festival when the space was not enough or it didn't have enough chairs for the audience. So at the end of the day we end up with a discussion about this place again because my main part of the job was related to the people and I talked more about this topic topic which is well associated with Romania nostalgic aspects. I would just say some terms that are important social, friendship, community that even get emotional solidarity, traumatic even burnout but at the same time we were able to start from scratch every time. So a definition we always tried to keep the spirit up against the fact that we went to protests against the fact that we were working in community projects and we would not always have funds but the motivation was there to work together towards a better conclusion. Our grants were not always the funds or the money but the audience, the public, the community and even more so when I started working in a public institution I realized again that the most important thing that I ever lived was the notion of liberty and freedom. This is the reason why I wasn't able to resist in a specific institution like that. At the end of the day that's the point to speak out what we think to put out the projects that we have in our hearts. Even though we had conflicts at times with the public authorities and at the end of the day I don't see the authorities in this room tonight so we end up again in an event where the same people come show up we're not in a dialogue with the local authorities but we always wished for a partnership with these local authorities but getting back to the topic what I liked most and what was a surprise especially because I supported her in the process of writing she had a great capacity in being objective but at the same time being very frank I'm really glad that she had the capacity to put out and to describe the events in a very sharp mode I try to avoid this aspect and I'm happy that Eugene has mentioned the topic of solutions just as Eugene said when I go to other cities in my case I move to Brussels I start to feel a lack of a social community and I remember how these societies here in Cluj I get the sense that there's a community here fighting back who tries to get things into motion and maybe this makes this place a point where we could make a shift towards a better future against the fact that we're speaking about ideal things I do think this is a mature way of putting this in realistic terms the question is what do we do from here I was thinking because it's the season of mushrooms I was thinking about the relationship between mushrooms and trees in the cities because they seem to be less in the city this relationship seems to to have been discontracted in time we were able to go and seek for mushrooms alone but maybe we can take this as a model because we were able to work independently from the state but maybe we should talk about new allegiances especially because we're all healing Cluj but even if we're not we can still be connected against the fact that the state often gives us the sense that we're abandoned I feel a bit as an invasive presence here the last time I was here was when Frim's play was played here Three Sisters by Jacob the public was mostly from the aristocracy from Bucharest it was an interesting moment followed by concert two main points and I'm gonna speak more from an outside perspective the standpoint of methodology I do think this book opens up many debates not only for the creative sector but even from the point of view of history and anthropology the research in anthropological terms is very, very seriously made this book gives an external validity to the sector of anthropology because it links external contexts from different countries with the context of university current context in Romania this opens up a new conceptual frame for me in this model that Mickey calls Hollywood Broadway translated to our context across as a tragedy as a tragic scenario because it does not come with a financial backup and support it proposes the model of a liberal market without the funds we are talking about transnational institutions that buy cultural products in a sense Mickey's case study describes the worst case scenario we are talking about neoliberalism in a background where this flow does not properly work and it generates a crisis that we now live it seems like the the economical crisis has produced a crisis but it's also the digital sector that has developed more and more and has enhanced this crisis and it has linked to again to the topic of spaces we're in a crisis of space and the competition comes from the digital sector because the IT sectors searches for spaces the model according to which Cluj develops is different from how the economical crisis was lived in other countries such as Greece there were not protests like in Greece for example but the main cause of this destruction and you mentioned this in your book it's a discrepancy in structure this growth in the digital sector has made pressure on the problem that we experience in the cultural section because it's problematic to exploit the cultural sector as a commodity and here comes the need to somehow reinvent ourselves as cultural people but this is a question that maybe maybe should be discussed in a second volume of the book but we should talk about the future this is the question at the end of the day I would say with Mickey our clients in the book is not something dualist like we have in the French model it's a project in a public service versus the paradigm of the market culture and the culture creative culture of commodities in the creative market where the funds dictate the way culture develops talking about this dualism I would make a point statistically speaking I looked at before this meeting how the state funded what are the modes of funding accorded by the state one is the public service which is really rigid and the other one is a sector that is funded more than needed that has a nationalist character if you look into what's funded in terms of culture in terms of religion for example or folklore you will notice there's a tendency to fund those aspects of culture that are nationalist in essence there are always access for the institutions that represent this sector of the culture that has access to the spaces for example we can talk here about religious cults if you look into this statistical data you would see a strong asymmetry so we have another developed public service which is poorly funded and we have the other side which is overly funded that relates to this nationalist and here comes the real tension if we look to the tensions of our local economy there's an interdependency and it's not bad in essence we developed quite well compared to other countries but it has generated a couple of tensions economical, cultural in nature which creates an association between neoliberalism and nationalism and if we look to those factors that legitimize certain aspects in the history of art if we look for example to models from Hungary or Poland or Slovakia, what do we see actually and nationalist ideology that gets theorized trying to redefine several important points from history in nationalist terms which somehow gives sense to the fact that funds are directed toward this type of cultural products because neoliberalism is so strongly linked to nationalism it can be that the end of this nationalist discourse will lead to a decrease and will influence many of the economical aspects this means public funds that are less and less accessible it will imply different geopolitical shocks which will create a state of austerity and the few resources that we anyway have will go towards this nationalist discourse that is so heavily linked to neoliberalism first book I would recommend that tackles these aspects in Hungary his essential argument is that neoliberalism is in essence an authoritarian project a model to which the answers are very brutal before the right wing came to power I would say a final word I don't have too much time what Samoan is at the end of the day Miki's book starts with a plus-bellied period what I liked was how the cultural sector worked before this time frame what's interesting in Kluge is the fact that the Hungarian institutions somehow inherited the model from the Austrian-Hungarian state upon which comes the model of the Romanian institutions I think it's important to study the phenomena that was before the time frame you studied in the book thank you that you're here and thank you Miki that we can leave your book here in the 25th anniversary of the transit house I had five of the processes that you have described I was implicated very closely we can say a lot of things about the book and I want to say some things that I noted down the things that stayed with me was your study we from the independent local scene we are in depth to you and also the cultural scenes one of the things that your book I think excels in is time the administration life is somewhat close to the cultural scene one of the terms you propose the interdependent brings me with the thought that the ecosystem that is marginalized and begins to disappear it's indeed an ecosystem we find ourselves in the same spaces many times same people working on common projects we were implicated at the project of Fabrica Depensura and also as a time project I see as being a transgenerational project me and my colleagues after colleagues in the building have been here for a long time and they are kind of old school there is a whole series of people that keep coming back collaborators as well those meetings between the generations and also projects that are thought of in time for me they taught me a lot of things another thing I wanted to mention related to your book is you accentuated it very clearly how we use the concepts this shows us your inclination towards philosophy even the concepts seem to be soft they are indeed they are heavy they are rough you also showed the political cultures assimilate those concepts there is this concept about economic sustainability and every time you are talking with someone and he asks you why don't you start a business with a bar or a café and to sustain the institute life if you have success with business and you give money to let's say the theater that this doesn't mean you sustain the theater life I would like to say that not everybody in this section is interested in this kind of things we are not talking about here the Broadway model we can see astonishing sums but we also want to talk about the small businesses the small cultural institutions that can't afford to pay those kind of funds I also noticed that you also showed how other political models but there is another transition for the independent term and what the independent term means introduced the French models after the war and the Americans ones and also the Yugoslav was in a very wonderful way I noted something down here when you were talking about spaces and I remember that you make it one point the book was talking about cultural space that was a sort of a promise in 2016 that it would be realized here in Klush one question I have about this concept regarding the politics social politics this was a sort of a fantasy about cultural operators that lose their spaces I really believe it's a solution for only a part of the cultural operators but I don't believe at all it's a solution for the rest the rest of the projects let's say the projects that regard the life in the city and second the transit house which is a project that stands on its own if it ends it ends here we are not going to do it anywhere else it's a project that looks at this place as it is and that's it from a concept point of view we are changing things and we are changing material things and I appreciate that you were sensible to those models and conceptions apparatus one question you are talking about the creative sector your defreshing between the cultural it's related to neoliberal ideology that's very rough also give birth to needs and maybe another question for a different study would be what kind of needs are produced in such frameworks we have some ideas I will give myself the answer but sometimes we see the language that becomes more and more specialized especially in the administration of the national culture found probably that's why there aren't many projects there because there aren't so many funds but it's starting to become a zone that it's more and more specialized the artist gets cut out of the process the process has no end the process of the administration of the national cultural found shows us that you cannot you cannot hold multiple events you cannot intertwine the calendars of the events and we can see that everything that gets pushed in front is this need for the new my impression is that from a point one I'm gonna finish soon let's say the implementation time has halved what kind of project can you do in three months let's say if you want to do two projects some projects take years my last phrase in 2019 when we had Transient Health some of the guys had a project here regarding the workers and a fabric there was a story with some guys that were working on the project and someone from an old game and I thought that there was nothing happening thank you for all the intervention and now we are opening the debate Niki came with some suggestion about the debate but of course if you have other propositions we won't decline them I would like to ask you to limit yourself to short intervations two or three minutes some of the themes that came out of this is the future what can we do and how will we do it Niki already told us that we need interdependence forms interdependence that is similar in mushrooms have let's say pessimistic propulsion if in the past we had hybridization with neoliberals now we see the danger of hybridizations with different forms and another theme is the state what should the state do what should the state promise we had different themes one of some of them were talking about having faith in this some of them didn't want to have to do anything with the state hi everyone first of all congratulate Niki I'm really happy that I was one of your students and I was able to share your ideas which are now in written form and really happy to be here and listen to them my idea which is also a question that has been on my mind from the very beginning since we spoke about broadway and mushrooms so my idea is that of the American model and that is because I get the impression that Romanian artists criticize the American artistic model a lot I'm talking about the United States of America and the USA industrializes art and yet I cannot help but ask myself if there were solutions are there any solutions or are there any answers that we could use that we could take from the USA we can see that the broadway and the off-broadway models work really well in the US so my question is are there some good ideas valuable ideas that we could use in the way art and artists work here I would like to say something very brief which relates to something that Cornelia said I think we should work on the foundation because in the USA to speak about foundations because they are supported by foundations in the USA yes the US model is interesting it works of course if you don't take a very close look at the victims but we have to bring everything into a historical context the great foundations in the US stem from the manufacturing American a model which was constituted a capital city which was constituted at the beginning of last century if we look at the digital digital field we will realize that companies such as Amazon or Pantheid or others do not show great interest they do not seem to be they are not really interested in the bourgeois prestige of New York for instance the money mainly goes into digital arc that can be commodified at some point turned into merchandise or towards the cinema but there is no digital equivalent in Guggenheim for instance or within large bank foundations such as Morgan and what not capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century is not very interested in giving independence to cultural entrepreneurs and this is the model that depicts collusion as well we cannot travel back in time and replicate the past of the U.S. model here in Cluj today this would mean time travelling this bubble we are talking about in the U.S. is supported by text deductions by prestige not so much in San Francisco and Silicon Valley as much as in Chicago and the East Coast and that is where we are right now in Cluj there are corporations and universities for instance that support this cultural world but I believe that we should try to explain why we don't need capital yes but this is a question I cannot answer I don't know if anyone would like to add something to attempt an answer or if not maybe there are other questions in the room very much for this first question I would like to congratulate Micky on her research work as well as on her work as an active citizen for so many years she continues her active citizen work she has been doing so within institutions it was very nice to listen to you you had such different and diverse approaches relates to the future I think it's okay to think about culture as a public service I think that we might have a consensus and everyone might agree with this even people coming from other walks of life or other ideologies everyone should have access to culture right? we could agree with that if you go to any type of community people will tend to agree with this concept just like people generally tend to agree that education should be free and accessible and the free public service just like with any other argument that becomes political at some point when you want to draw reasons in order to be able to implement public policy or type of institution the question arises is how do you do it and I think you should stick to one important topic one important theme the question is what is that theme like when you're trying to promote a lot of different things but then realize that it's very difficult to solve all of the themes all of the problems so we need to stick to one which is why culture and cultural services have to be public and in order for that to happen we need resources we need capital just like Kornelban was saying I don't agree with him where the question we should ask we shouldn't ask why people who don't give money, why they don't need culture in Romania this doesn't make too much sense so perhaps we should ask why Facebook and Google do not finance culture it doesn't mean that Romania doesn't have capital that could be received into culture but I think that's a dead end road and that brings us to public funds public money maybe the city hall is a bit too rigid and maybe some people who want to work in these institutions cannot be game changers they cannot transform institutions so these institutions become guaranters of culture but there might be other institutions that are still public but have a certain kind of autonomy and these institutions might have some resources so let me ask you this what if the pain brush factory could continue by moving to a university building the university as public and autonomous so I'm thinking about this possibility maybe there are certain institutions that are public but would be open but would be open to become facilitators for culture as a public good so the question is how independent can the sector stay and what does it want more to be autonomous completely autonomous or independent to be characterized by its autonomy in other words or I would like to go back to what Conel was saying I think that the nationalist paradigm we were talking about is part of the future but at the same time if we think of the administration of the national cultural fund we see that around 2010 the money was stopped at some point there is very little money from this cultural fund but my question to you Miki basically is the following should this cultural sector be rather more independent or more public what's the main characteristic what should be the main characteristic of this field of this sector and then we can use some more progressive institutions that could be guarantors of course we could add several ideas to this like urban development education and so on one of the hybridization options was to talk to state institutions that are open enough and want a partnership you cannot force them into anything and speaking of universities I think that we could have a good partnership with the university as long as the university can also bear constructive critique and now I remember that we met at Occupy UBB think that the university could come up with some solutions of course it cannot find it cannot come with a magic bullet but for instance it could allot 25% of its rooms to the alumni I think it's important to maintain this bond with the graduates if the space of universities were thought that way were envisaged that way we could have this continuous kind of culture within universities and that's how we could also support young graduates you cannot demand universities to allot all their rooms but you could ask for 25% perhaps I forgot to say something and that was this bit about universities especially here in Occluse we cannot avoid this topic whichever way we look at culture that is because culture is parcel of the city and the university as well because it has so many buildings almost 300 buildings the university has almost 300 buildings and this is why I think that's inevitable that we raise questions that Claude was asking as well but the topic of today's debate asks for the impossible we need financing but we don't want to be controlled we want to be free, we want to use spaces we want enough money so these are topics that are contradictory this is the paradigm that Cornel was talking about we might be financed but we might not be able to use certain words for instance these are not just hypothesis these are real struggles many people here in the room have gone through over the past few years so this is why I think that maybe we might come across the same kind of conflict with universities so in order to avoid such difficult situations I think we could expect the university to give spaces that have a greater degree of freedom and the university here in Cluj is very diverse we might be able to invite them to open some of their spaces so that we can also access them just like the city hall here in Cluj has really tried hard with marriage to cinema I don't know if you know the story of this movie theater but it was gradually financed and then this space was opened to the public but then it was restricted given the real estate situation here we can expect the great players too to produce and give us spaces there are other producers such as Bosch for instance but what I'm trying to say is that we can expect the university to try to help us support us with some kind of spaces we can also take a look at theaters, operas cinemas and all other spaces that belong to public state institutions I believe we have a short list of heads of institutions that we can approach we can go and ask these people the following question will you accept a different kind of cultural program in your own institutions program this is the kind of constructive conflict I was talking about I think politeness would be overrated in our current situation I don't think that anyone here believes we're facing a rosa situation if we want to know that we're struggling if there's any cultural producer who's thriving right now please stand up right now I want to applaud you I want to give you a round of applause because everyone else is doing poorly to make a great effort not to kill everyone's joy I will start with a personal story of the 22 years since I've moved to New Zealand I can say that for eight years I published I published a magazine a magazine that was published four times a year I issued this magazine with my students at some point there was a discussion about the production costs born by the institution the school I was teaching at the discussions lasted for about a week we reached the conclusion that it wouldn't be good to have those covers costs covered by the institution I think that this idea about collaborating with the universities might be an illusion don't think me passive but back when I was a student it's true there was censorship at the time there were a lot of battles political battles at the time but back then all the important universities in Romania had magazines that were finest by them and written by students by students every faculty had a club the teachers, the professors would chip in every now and then but by and large it was the students who produced these magazines I wonder now at great companies or institutions so where are the clubs where students can get together and create together I hope you don't think of me as passive that's not my idea what I'm thinking right now is for instance, I teach at the faculty of theater just like Mr. Claude Durkwil well he teaches film at the same faculty civilized university or faculty in Europe the theater of the university where students can go and act and have projects freely so I'm really sorry for being a killjoy we don't have financiers to think in perspective but we don't have academics to think about the future and about the fact that students have other rights than just to go and have a beer together with colleagues experience teaches me that if there's some kind of wonder we could reach the connection to the universities you were talking about I think things will not get off the ground because I believe for many people working within the university will try to censor ideas will try to tell people that they cannot talk about certain topics I think that people who help like universities who might be able to help with spaces will want to control the ideas that are propagated afterwards and when I was speaking I thought of the following thing I see so many cases around me of people reinventing themselves and repositioning themselves and I was wondering why did we start doing community work the purpose to be active citizens makes me think of a kind of awakening I remember when I was working at La Torre Nourie in the neighborhood in Cluj we were so fearful that we would lose our space so we would ask ourselves what do we do afterwards now that we no longer have that space we had to reinvent ourselves now I realize that Niki and Dai are no longer active in those projects so we had to reinvent ourselves and I believe we have taken on different hats now but we maintained our work ethic and I find it fascinating to observe and to be part of this of this repositioning because I think the purpose is by large the same what we can see is that the public space is getting bigger, it's getting larger it's not just the street where we protested or fought for statements that might be more subversive and citizens be heard now I notice that public goods and public spaces can be debated and renegotiated and I think this is the next level and it might even be more subversive than we might imagine I think that each and every one of us plants different kinds of seeds we might not know what we will get but we might get something interesting we might have hybrid plants just very briefly I would like to comment upon what you said Clau would do when I was a student I remembered that I didn't have university spaces for the exams for my projects but at the same time I remember that we had a special room was it Jörga room I think which was part of the main building of the university and I remember that we had that Occupy event we reclaimed the space for every citizen not just for students so what you're saying is really nice and interesting and I think we should march on this idea at the same time we should bear in mind the fact that culture is a phenomenon that has always been there it doesn't belong to the state so I think that the state should take care of the cultural phenomenon it should take care of it not like it takes care of the forest but like something precious like the army right of course we should have spaces that are independent on the other hand when I go back to the paintbrush factory if I think of these space if I think of this space we're in these are spaces that can be used by students and maybe we can simply have a collaborative kind of system that's more integrative Miki is working at university right now now my approach is external I have to say I'm thinking about the former rectors and the current and the former rectors of the Babishbu University and I think they also played a role in how the university positions itself I would like to add some things as well I'm thinking of a reaktor the independent theater inclusion where I'm the co-manager together with Wana Martare it has been supported by many cultural institutions inclusion every summer for instance we were given spaces for our residents projects we were given money from the faculty and from other institutions inclusion so more often than not when we ask for something we get it but I think it's the way we relate to all of this is problematic I don't think that the institutions must support the independent sector I think they have to support themselves and the independent sector has to be to support itself as well so my question is well of course we make proposals and we ask for things but why can't things happen the other way around why can't institutions come and make proposals and make requests to what extent could the university use a transparent budget right the university has five euros today at the beginning of the year we'll use these five euros to finance independent cultural projects and the condition our only condition would be for the project to include students the national theater could do the same thing it could allot a small part of the budget to projects I'm lucky enough to know many people but there might be younger cultural operators who don't know enough people and don't know where to go and ask for money so I think this is an opportunity for a meet up on common ground so that everyone can win and everyone can in fact benefit because of course there is censorship as well but I think that if we can see the two way benefits things will look up in very broad lines that's what I wanted to say good evening about the discussion concerning universities I don't think we should leave it aside all together even if we can raise some kind of conflict there was I remember the equinox magazine belonging to the faculty of Lattice I remember that they had a very critical issue in 2005 I believe or slightly earlier the reaction of the then rector was that some of the writers were producing the magazine to be sacked but there was a reaction at the time and those persons were not sacked I remember Occupy UBB back in 2013 I remember that the police came and wanted to evacuate us we could see the reactions in real time online and we were not evacuated so what I'm trying to say is that there is room for reclaiming critical positions but we should base everything on reality and El Jumper Nesco knows this we were talking about this stopping in 2020 we were talking about identifying certain spaces that belong to the to Babishwe University in Kaluj this is the university that has the smallest number of spaces if we relate this number of spaces to its needs in fact I think we can take critical positions whenever repercussions might arise I think that we still have this civic reaction in Kaluj that can protect us from abuse now going back to public services and what was discussed in the first part of the debate the problem in Kaluj is not that we don't have culture as a public good speaking of untold we were criticizing renting flats for a lot of money renting the space for the festival for a lot of money without any kind of competition whatsoever well there were reactions saying well finally Kaluj is important and renowned so people believe that the festival already provides this kind of public service I remember that back in 2006 or 7 the International Transylvania Film Festival received enough little money received little money and I began a campaign at the newspaper I was writing for at the time so I drew a parallel between sports and culture and theater I drew a parallel between the international situations and after a week the budget from the budget of the cultural council doubled the budget for a culture that was all due to this public pressure but after untold happened I can no longer see this pressure because people believe that untold as a festival offers this, provides this public service basically the space where the festival takes place is held in a public area so they feel like they are of public benefit to everyone which is why they no longer feel that they have to do something for the public I would like to say in the end that I can't wait to read Miki Braneshda's book and I can't wait to read her conclusions because we've had so many discussions throughout time about culture inclusion and I would also like to say that I remembered this the fact that we gather and talk about all these things here is a privilege we had those years of freedom where we were able to meet in pubs at the Pain Brush Factory in Insomnia Cafe and in other unconventional spaces where there was a community that other cities lacked and at the same time I feel this anger that we're losing this that the energy doesn't live on I see some familiar faces here in the room but there are so many new faces it's true that I haven't been part with the past few years but I feel like we no longer have that energy, that momentum so I am quite angry at the prospect of losing that momentum thank you and congratulations Miki but that energy wasn't an illusion it's still within us good evening I come from Bucharest and my perspective is slightly different but since I have a thought I would like to share it with you I was a local counsellor at the City Hall in Bucharest I still am in fact but I was part of the Culture Commission in my last term so I know the figures really well not just the budget and the figures I'm also well acquainted with all the employment and the rents you were talking about all the spaces that are available I would just like to think basic and fundamental and concrete to our discussion so in Bucharest for instance the City Hall been given 350,000 lei yearly to all the cultural institutions that belong to the City Hall and that's been happening since 2016 this is the money that is given to culture by the City Hall the cultural products because you might wonder what kind of culture is produced in Bucharest so there is no connection to the independent area and the independent sector nothing went to the independent sector between 2016 and 2020 now the money in fact between 2 million lei is invested in independent culture out of the 250-300 million they spent yearly so I was wondering economically speaking and since Kluge is an entrepreneurial city and I think this is something that also happened in Bucharest which means that the money comes back to the City Hall which means that the budget of the City Hall of Kluge Napoka will increase and has already increased a lot and I understand from Alexander here next to me that there is just one cultural centre that gets very little money from the City Hall and there is 10 million lei for grants perhaps this is an opportunity for Kluge perhaps the citizens of Kluge and the people in the cultural sector ask for more money for culture in Kluge I would like to remind you that in Bucharest we have so many other smaller institutions pertaining to the City Hall and none of these spaces are open to the independent sector so what I would like to say is that there is no such thing in Kluge but maybe you could build a different model from the very get-go you could a lot more money to the independent sector and do so constantly maybe on a yearly basis on a yearly budget and you could do it through institutions or otherwise what I want to say is don't give up on asking for money for budgets from City Hall because the amounts are huge and this would be a question to you as local decision makers we have never understood how we could evaluate or assess the quality of cultural projects because in my whole career I was never able to see good authentic cultural products within the City Hall in my opinion the quality of the project I saw is very low I could attempt an answer asking money for structural asking money for wages for instance and for costs for maintenance costs is something we that's been haunting us for a long time because we kept hearing this argument there is no legal framework for this kind of sponsorship Miki talks about an interview with who was the Minister of Culture and we were wondering during the pandemic what are we going to do about the rents and the Minister of Culture kept saying no I cannot help you this is state 8 in a very short while companies so companies were helped in order to be able to pay their rented spaces in shopping malls perhaps the Minister of Culture didn't have the right leverage at the time to negotiate such costs for us on the other hand when it comes to the assessment of quality I think that there needs to be some risk taking you should spend a lot of money on bad productions in order to eventually gain and obtain good productions I just want to make a quick point we first of all have the spaces in the independent sector so I think the most important point is that we should exploit first and foremost the infrastructure that we already have we should good night if tomorrow the cultural centres we already have would disappear I think the reaction will be just as small as it was and the paintbrush factory disappeared I think people will cry for a day and that will be it I think we should look a bit around and to re-evaluate how important the independent sector is in the cultural scene inclusion and here I will bring into discussion an opinion of a very important businessman inclusion very famous one in regards to the development of the independent sector inclusion he said you should go and ask the people what they want and if they give you an answer you should produce precisely what they want I would say this is a rather cynical answer because people seem to not understand what is the added value that the independent sector provides and as long as the people do not understand this matters the independent sector will remain rather a myth and I do think this person's opinion speaks to the way more people think maybe we would like to and it is a sad reality but I do think it is rather a thinking pattern people do ask more about the context of this claim but I do think it is not relevant and here again it is not important because it outlines the thinking pattern it reflects the way of how the people of inclusion, the audiences position themselves to the independent sector we often get to the conclusion that we are in a bubble and once we get out of that bubble we realize we are restricted to our own reality things often are different outside our bubble for me it was a wake up call to understand how people coming from the entrepreneurial sector approach in general if we do think about it there are not grants from this side from the entrepreneurial side there is no prize from Google for example I think we shouldn't think in a mechanical way about this dynamics and I think the dialogue exists between the cultural actors and the audiences there is a constant exchange between them why then do the audiences not always feel something common from the independent sector I think it is a relative question we thank you for coming tonight this was one final word upstairs there is an exhibition thank you