 There is going to be live streaming, I suppose you know that, and then you can watch it later, if you would like to repeat the session, in the archive of the BITF. It's my great pleasure to present to you today Jonathan Vickery, Associate Professor and Director of the MA Arts, Enterprise and Development from Warwick University. He's going to present us a challenging issue under the title Army Multicultural, Trans-Cultural, Pluralist or just Internationalist, Culture, Mobility and Political Ideology. Jonathan Vickery is very well known throughout Europe on several end of the world, due to several of his research interests. At Warwick, he serves on the steering group of Warwick Global Research Priorities Committee on International Development. Outside of it, he is co-director of the Shanghai City Lab, Chairman of the Art of Management and Organization, it's a non-profit research company, and then Ambassador for the EU-funded CREATE project, Network of Cities for Artistic Creation. He has been an Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College member since 2009, and has just been invited to serve as member of the Peer Review College. Dr. Vickery spent three years in art schools, then six years working in a variety of art projects, design jobs and experimental communal living, before taking his first degree in the history of art and architecture at University of Norwich. His graduate work was in the Department of Art, History and Theory, University of Essex, where he completed MA and then PhD on modernist aesthetics and contemporary art. After a year teaching at Regent's College London, he was Henry Moore Post-Doctoral Fellow at Essex, then in 2001 he became a lecturer in modern and contemporary art in the history of art department here at Warwick. Dr. Vickery was invited to join the Center for Cultural Policy Studies in 2004. He has since been a visiting scholar at Belgrade, Hildesheim and Poznan universities. He has found three master's degrees in creative industries, starting with the MA in International Design and Communication, which ran for five years, being replaced with the MA Global Media and Communication, then introducing the MA Arts Enterprise and Development. I had a pleasure to collaborate with Jonathan Vickery on several different conferences, projects, he created a group dealing with cultural development. He was inviting me to collaborate on his book about Jochen Gerz, which he presented just two days ago in Belgrade Goethe Institute. Of course, he was teaching to our students at UNESCO Chair of Cultural Policy and Management. Our two departments, in fact, are collaborating in different manners since 1992, since the creation of the European Network of Cultural Administration Training Centers. In that time, Oliver Bennett and me have been in the Executive Board of the UNCAN. So, please, Jonathan, it's your time. Thank you. Excellent. Well done, everyone, for getting here on a Sunday morning. This would never happen in the UK. Here we are at the Conference on Festivals and Cultural Diplomacy. I'd like to thank Professor Milner for her vision and determination and generosity in bringing an international group like this together, talking about an embodiment of geo-political cultural mobility. That's what we are. Part of my question this morning is really asking some of what are the big issues facing us, and many of which were coming out of yesterday's discussions. Very intense and dense discussions from a whole range of people all around fundamental issues on the politics of culture and how culture takes on political agency. And that's what we're here to discuss. That's what I'm going to be discussing. The title of my paper, which is a bit of a mouthful, is more of a provocation and what it is a question about us in this space discussing festivals and cultural diplomacy. Yesterday, so many of the statements that were being articulated by so many different knowledgeable people speaking out of extraordinary experiences, those questions were, for me, asking for us to think a bit deeper about what you might call the political philosophies, which are kind of the source of our language and thinking, our thought processes on festivals and cultural diplomacy. We use words like democracy, and I'm wondering whenever someone uses that term, I'm thinking to my head, what do they mean? What are their reference points? What are their coordinates for their use of that term? And we're living in a super complex world in which these terms are, you know, they can signify quite different things, they can function very differently. I'm feeling disorientated this morning. Most of us, well, many of us here were in this very room last night, 11 p.m. watching this amazing production of a new play called Freedom, the Most Expensive Capitalist World. And I went back to the hotel and fell asleep about quarter past midnight, and I dreamt I was in North Korea. And they made me the Minister of Cultural Policies. And of course they asked me what I wanted to do, and of course I said, bring Bitef to North Korea. Anyway, it went on and on and on. But there are issues here that I've been thinking of these last couple of years, and I'm going to sort of not talk through my academic research, which believe you me is not that interesting, but I'm going to talk through my experience of working with a cultural, an international cultural project in my university city. And so I'm going to try and engage with the dialogue that emerged yesterday from practitioners of cultural policy interlocutors and people who work across cultural management in situations of intercultural transit and mobility. I'm going to be sort of talking through some of the issues that I have encountered in this project. In my paper I do discuss these terms of multicultural, transcultural, pluralist and internationalist, because it's a way I understand the recent history of cultural diplomacy. Or if you like the recent history of culture taking on political agency on the level of national and international politics, and I go back to UNESCO's founding vision, which I believe the Constitution was a statement that could have become a platform for cultural diplomacy, but was overtaken by successive waves of what I define as political philosophies. And multiculturalism may be a public policy in wonderful countries like Canada and Sweden, but underlying that is a set of philosophical assumptions on what culture is and how culture can be organized socially, particularly trans-migrationally, where you take people from perhaps India and put them in the UK. How does public policy think of that situation? And trans-culturalism being very, I define as very, very powerful, ranging from sort of late modernist and post-modernist thinking, celebrations on this new globalized culture that we all as educated professional people enjoy. You know, I travel around the world and you know, it's not difficult. I find myself wherever I go in fabulous hotels and people speaking English and you know, sometimes the same art exhibitions, whether I'm in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur. You know, we live in a sort of globalized world. It's very easy to celebrate that, and indeed we do when you think of the world your grandparents lived in. But it's been made possible by formations of economic globalization that also have a dark side, as you know, a problematic side, particularly for culture and cultural policies. And so I kind of excavate this history and then suggest that we need to think about this discourse that has actually been lost within this trajectory of cultural policy, and that's the discourse of pluralism. And it was lost most vividly within the debates on diversity within UN circles that moved from really out from the late 1980s through the 1990s. Lots of people writing wonderful things about pluralism as a kind of new political framework for understanding intercultural mobility and the cultural, the way cultural policy could make a real contribution to understanding what is a society under mass migrations and profound economic change. And yet it was lost. The first declaration on cultural diversity at UNESCO in 2001, it in a sense crystallized thought that had been emerging for a decade and then by the time the convention came along through the UN assembly in 2005, it disappeared. And instead what we had is diversity, which were really echo just a few articles in the original declaration and it was mainly about products and international trade and all the protections and promotions that we need to secure in the face of huge economic globalization. But that was significant for me and I attempt to retrieve it as a very powerful way of understanding, you know, political agency in culture and how we move from political agency to cultural diplomacy. Because that's a question we all have maybe perhaps involved in arts organizations which have a certain political agency, that is they are constituted in a way in which they dialogue on issues of policy, perhaps with authorities or think about memory and history and the narratives that make our place and space what it is. Perhaps national identity, perhaps municipal, perhaps regional or ethnic or even religious. But perhaps, you know, you're still thinking, well, how do I get from that state of political agency to what we call diplomacy and what does that mean? And then there is the official discourse of cultural diplomacy where governments talk about it and use culture within their framework, which I think is quite clear and we're all kind of aware of that. But I think for this conference the questions we are asking is how do we move from like an arts organization or even an intellectual or an artist who can construct a sense of political agency and perhaps move toward a sense of cultural diplomacy or think, you know, what is diplomacy? How do I engage in the negotiations and deliberations in relation to geopolitical power? That, you know, is the preside of diplomacy. So that's the kind of logic of my paper. My paper, you can read it, you know, all of it, all the interesting and the boring bits later. What I'm going to try and do now is pick out the pieces which I think relate and follow on from yesterday's, you know, the complex discussions we had yesterday. I think that would be more beneficial for us as a general way of framing the conference and giving you also kind of a tense space of discussion and feedback. But I need to check on time. We've shifted the schedule. It's now 10 o'clock. How much do we have? Okay. Okay, we'll try to do 20 minutes and then we can open it out. Right. Now, about a year and a half ago, I started thinking about political agency and, you know, the questions of cultural diplomacy. As at the last International Cultural Policy Congress in Hildesheim, the career was the last one, but the last but one in Hildesheim, which I was very involved in, you know, the kind of politics of culture and cultural organizations started to become more and more important to our discussions on cultural policies and how we understand them and how they function. And I started to think then, not really research, but, you know, started to read and think about the whole history and nature of cultural diplomacy or the political agency of culture. Now, as Milan has said, part of my interest in modernism as a graduate student, of course, you can't study modernism without understanding that if you like political agency of art, since, you know, God, the mid-19th century, since Courbet and Delacroix and then up to the avant-garde and then the revolutions of the 60s and 70s, of course. You know, the last 150 years art has been visibly shot through with politics, but we're not talking about that. We're not talking about, you said, the intense relation between aesthetics and politics. We're really talking about organizational politics, the way of policies and management and enterprise for culture and how that is framed politically. And I joined together with a Polish artist. As you might well know, the UK now is heavily populated by people from Eastern Europe. And there's a politics around that, but by and large, everyone must admit secretly in the public also. Yeah, thank God for them, because they have contributed a lot, but not just economically. I mean, I celebrate what they bring culturally. And, you know, we had this vision of an arts organization which visibly promoted East-West. You know, not just saying, oh yeah, we like immigrants because they're of economic value, which is the general rationale for immigration, the government sells. Rather, immigration is a huge opportunity for learning, for knowledge, for dialogue, for creating new kinds of cultural agency. And so we set up this art organization called Kaleidoskop East-West, which is a Polish term, my partner made it up. Now, we do many things, but one of the things we have done were what we call micro-festivals. Very, very small festivals. Festivals that are so small that you get to know all the people personally. And that's what we wanted, because what we wanted to do was to really use the festival, not to just set up an event, but as a, if you like, medium of knowledge, because we were confused and we believe the public sphere is completely confused politically. Left, right, this, that, globalization, anti-globalization, capitalism. We love it, of course we do, we get paid by it, but at the same time we all hate it. We're all against neoliberalism, but we actually all are neoliberals, because we have no choice, and so on and so on. Huge confusion, intellectual confusion, and politicians are quite often the most confused if you talk to them. So let's make that a visible reality and reflect on it. Like, let's admit it and be honest and open about the confusion and the sources of confusion and conditions of confusion. Because if we're not, usually it leads to victimization. You know, we don't like this, whose fault is it? You know, that kind of logic. Kaleidoscope East-West set up these three small micro festivals which have run in the last year. They're micro in the sense that they begin by demarcating a very small and limited space. It may be a conceptual space, it may be a part of a city, or it may be inside one room. There are three very different festivals, and the last one was in collaboration with a theater called the Albany Theater, which we do work for, research work for, and evaluation work for. The first one was, well, it didn't have a name. It was called Kaleidoscope because it was the first thing we did. And so we just said, well, this is, what is this? Because these micro festivals were medium of knowledge, basically responding to our confusion over what to do, what is a festival, what's the function of a festival, you know, where can we go with this? Is this just about putting on events and attracting an audience and trying to survive financially and then programming something artistically challenging? So we decided, look, forget it. We don't have any money, forget the programming. We've got no expertise in festival management. Let's just create a space. And let's just, if you like, invite participants and they can construct the program and see where we go. I mean, we didn't know what we were doing. So I'd be, start with an honesty of what we don't know and, you know, the expertise we don't possess. And it was extraordinary how, you know, what came out were a whole load of people. I mean, we went up to about a hundred people over two days, no more than a hundred, because we were inside a mental health unit, quite appropriately. It was a mental health unit of the National Health Service, who simply lent their kind of cafe space to us, of which we then invited a whole round of, in fact, we didn't make personal invitations. We simply, it was a kind of snowballing network process. We said to a few people, look, we're putting this on. What do you think? Are you interested? Are your friends interested? Do you know people? And a huge range of people came, and they were the program. So the participants were the program, because what we were aiming for is knowledge. And so that was the first, the other was, again, we demarcated a space. This time an outdoor cafe space. And this time we started responding to certain kinds of public issues that were emerging in the city. Food may seem a rather benign issue, but actually in Britain there's huge public policy health crises around food, but there's a rising movement of global food justice in Coventry, where people are taking over disused pieces of land, turning them into urban agriculture, and educating people about the origin of food, the nature of food, and how food is the basis of community. And so we simply created a space and said, let's explore food justice. And again, the participants were the program. We had no ability to program. We just allowed extraordinary things came along, just turned up. And, you know, it just, it emerged out of that was a kind of energized group of people sort of empowered with these issues. And that became a platform for which we are then speaking to the city about these issues. And the third one was this collaborative project called the Spon Spon Festival, which demarcated a space in a very neglected and poor part of the city. And we did various things. We hired a storyteller. This was our one programming act of hiring a storyteller. He was a professional storyteller. And he said, we need to just walk through this space and tell stories and ask the people here to tell their story. Now, it was one of the most incredible experiences I've had because we started finding out that this neglected, really horrible looking space had the most extraordinary history in that city, but also it was a dumping ground for all the unemployed and refugees and people who really were marginal to the political economy of the city and they had the most incredible stories. And I was quite emotionally overwhelmed by how the most marginalized, useless people in the city put on these social estates paid for by the city had the most amazing stories. Just where they had come from, how they had get here, how they got here, their family, what has happened to them. Their experience socially, politically, quite extraordinary. And we ended by giving, the community theater has an amazing stage and sound system and we gave it over to people with other marginal people, this time marginal on account of their social or psychological debilitation, usually with mental health problems. And they happened to have a band of people with serious mental health problems and so we ended the day with this band, which was wonderful. Those were my three micro-events which to me have taught me a lot more about the political agency of culture than I think my academic research could have taught me because the intelligence that was at work there was an emotional intelligence, was an artistic intelligence, was a social intelligence, the kinds of embodied manifestations you don't get with conceptual discourse. Now, I, you know, started thinking at this time, well, what are we doing? What's the framework? What's the project here? What am I looking for? What is the knowledge that these micro-fests are sort of really going to get? Well, I knew what knowledge they were giving me, but how was I going to codify that and turn that into some agenda? How do I politicize our arts organization with an agenda and then try and look towards some diplomatic space? And that was the big issue and we're sort of at that point of thinking this through. And I want to sort of tell you in a sense what responses we got as a way of telling you what we found from both the art world within the city, the cultural sector, the existing cultural sector, but also sort of my academic colleagues who were asking why I was wasting my time doing things in the community. That's not my job. It's not your job. That was the kind of response I was getting. But I was getting responses and I quote people saying things like, it's not big, small, small is insignificant, or even worse. It looks like community art. Or worse, somebody said it looks like art therapy, which of course in the UK, that's just the pits. Therapy involves people with mental health problems. You're really moving down the cultural ladder of credibility, which is something that outrages me because the people I met on that day were extraordinary people. They had profound problems, but they were extraordinary people who, given the space of cultural agency, they were doing things they'd never done before. And the change, the personal level of change for them was quite something. And that was the great thing about the MicroFest is that you didn't have audiences. Everyone was a participant, even the people who were organizing every bit as much as them. And personal transformation was part of the micro experience. Because when you're in that small, it has to be, the participatory motivation is always personal, or will involve the personal at some point. Someone else said, what's the brand? Where's your marketing? No one has heard about this. You don't matter not because of what you're doing, but because no one in the city has heard about it. Interesting. Number three, who's performing? You don't have a star or celebrity performer or someone with some kind of brand cachet, then no one's interested. At least no one in the professional world are interested. Well, this was one, as even the community arts manager asked me this. What's your S-R-O-I? Social return on investment. And how are you measuring it? As an academic, I was thinking, sure, of course, what the hell? Of course, I know what that is, but no, we didn't do it. I mean, I do like it. Social return on investment is a huge kind of, hello. Welcome. No, no, please come and sit. Yes, relax. Welcome. I'm terribly sorry. You're welcome. No, not at all. Not at all. And the last one, and colleagues at the university said this to me, be careful. Those immigrants could be illegal. Get their passports. Lots of other contrary. I was accused of a conflict of interest with the university. I don't know what that meant. Health and safety, big problems, and so on and so on. But it did remind me how, yes, being outside the political economy of culture in the city, you know, there were some real legal issues. A lot of people pointing the finger at me. And the biggest finger was, you are not a festival manager. You're not competent. This is not your area of expertise. You're wasting your time and you're embarrassing everyone else. Just get back to the library. Well, I started as an artist, a failed artist, but I started as an artist. So I didn't start as a career academic. I got very angry when people start, you know, putting those categories on me. But, again, just to clarify, we were deliberately using a space that was outside the institutionalized world of art that was outside the political economy of culture. When this came up yesterday, how the political economy of culture in cities is a very real organ of power. And where you are positioned within that, where you sit inside or outside, has grave consequences for your sustainability as an art, organizational artist. But also, for me, these micro-fests were a kind of living lab because so much of the politics were manifest through these events. And the contexts of debate they created, they attracted critics like flies. I mean, people very quick to point out what was wrong. Which, for me, with my emphasis on knowledge and the creation of knowledge, and this was very, very important. The responses to this were part of my research, part of my research. Partly as, you know, my political philosophy holds that actually, I don't like using the word research, which is a science word, scientists use it. I see knowledge as a creative act. And that really what we need to think about with our performances and arts organizations is really, you know, the extraordinary value, the human value they can produce as, you know, organs of knowledge. Running parallel, if you like, to the world of research, which is a scientific and kind of the regime of governmentality rules those are a lot stricter, but also a lot more partial and less comprehensive. So that is, I'll just get to where we got yet just a couple of minutes now just by then bringing it back to the discussions of this conference and saying what are the problems? What are the problems? Well, problem one is, as I say, the question of economy. The question that we really all play a role in somewhere in the political economy of our place whether it's a city or a country, if you are involved in culture, you are positioned within that field of power. And quite often we know the practicalities of that, who our stakeholders are, who our funders are, this, you know, building and all the rest of it. But in terms of, if you like, the knowledge dimension, what philosophy of culture are we there, therefore living out here? What philosophy of culture? What are our fundamental values and what are we achieving? How are we engaging in transformation actually and whether actually we don't change anything but we're part of a larger economy that is changing the city quite often as a space for consumption. And what I found is, is that not only that every other organization and arts agency in my city who became aware of us had, if you like, ingested this economic managerialism of the city's governmentality and were looking at us and making accusations that we were unprofessional and disorganized and because we weren't acting like strategic managers and we didn't have investment strategies and this strategy and that's policy. But the inculcation into neoliberal economy within the cultural sector is just an unbelievably deceptive area. And some of the most radical artists in our city, you know, you talk with them and they talk like, you know, American corporate strategists and seeing us as the enemy. We were one more competitor in a field of decreasing resources, therefore we were enemy. Understanding the arts field as a competitive market of literally fighting over resources in a limited territory, that's the kind of mentality we were facing. But also the way that political agency is understood, that what culture is for and to get funding, to even survive now you are having to be positioned as somehow delivering on the policy aims of a place or somehow playing a role in that place. And so I think as Mike van Klan said yesterday, you know, we talk about cultural diplomacy as a set of practices which are kind of in one specific area, usually at the higher level of institutional practice and government. But actually it's a spectrum of actions that we're probably carrying out all the time about representing ourselves, about, you know, mediating the values of the place in which we live, both neoliberal economy but also our country, our city. And there are a number of different agendas we can adopt but we usually adopt them without really understanding or thinking about the philosophies of culture on which they are based. And there are a number of ways forward on this. I mean the first is, and Professor Milnerness said yesterday in relation to Serbia, you know, it actually says on the website, the conference website about, you know, rethinking Serbian national culture. And that doesn't have to be something that you do managed by government or dictated by government but it's a very, very powerful way of moving from political agency to political diplomacy by taking your country as, if you like, the subject of your political agency and think, right, I'm going to think through the memory and narratives and place that my country is or perhaps in other countries, representing your country, you know, in the diversity that the government would never represent it as. And they don't or perhaps lastly really representing the kind of suppressed values, the social values within your country that government or authority would never, you know, represent. Which is what I found in the micro festivals. The amazing participants would never be represented within any political realm. In fact, they'd be an embarrassment probably or, you know, they certainly wouldn't signify professional cultural values in the way in which, you know, a governmental authority would require in order to further their interests. And so by festivals and cultural diplomacy, the discussion we were having yesterday was not so much about how we get in with government and start being rolled in their international diplomacy but how do we do the work of diplomacy outside of government as a kind of independent, perhaps international, informal economy of solidarity of people like us, cultural agents that are concerned with constructing a political agency for culture and doing the work of diplomacy but in a critical way and representing people not political interests. So I'll end there. Thank you. Thank you Jonathan for incredible rich presentation. I don't know even how I could resume all what you have said to us about new, let's say, agencies in cities such as micro festivals, micro events as living labs and importance of knowledge productions but through creative acts considering as a creative act. I thought it's so important, in fact, and that's the reason that often we try, not often rarely we try but sometimes when we try it's very successful, to link our research academic boring scientific conferences with artist and artistic contributions so that that's really, like I would see BTIF also as a platform. As you said also, you mentioned yesterday performance, that's a dialogue. We are in dialogue with all performances on BTIF and that's kind of knowledge production because especially that lastly that you said how this not only city governmentalities but the spirit of the time imposed to art and culture this new liberal repressive measures to consider everything, every human act as investment and to think about return. So I have to say that up to now happily in Serbia we haven't heard on this social return on investment within arts and culture, we heard that in some other areas but yes this is something that it's going to come for sure. And the key issue is how we are raising awareness among ourselves that we should not contribute further to the changing of a city as a space of consumption to at least our own work. And finally I'm just trying to resume a few issues which can be very interesting for debate. This about representativity, what we are representing. Very often for example I was using two slides, however Serbian culture was represented by work for example of Martin Jonas who is Slovak artist, naive painter but not of a kind, not Susana Halupova which was used in national presentation because it's a happy Slovak naive art. It's happy villages, how we want to represent ourselves as a country of diversity. Not through this labor, hard work, life and so on. Not to say that those that it will never be the question that cultural diplomacy would let arts be representing through repressed values, through real diversity of society. Because it's always the fear of lack of professionalism is usually excuse. There is other fear which is behind but then it's usually saying like as you said like working with the people with mental health problem that it's considered that you are degrading your own professionalism and so on. This is the cultural professionals here also that are facing every day this kind of, let's say even discrimination because they are dealing with people, they are doing their artistic work, researching and doing participative projects with people with different kind of projects, people from social margins and so on. But now I would really like to open up debate and with of course we are going to join whenever you want. Do you have any comments or questions for Jonathan? Early morning so, yes please, another Jonathan. I'm going to be, it's really short, I just want to say that when I heard what you were saying I made very immediate connections to the work of the freedom theatre and the idea of penetrating the political agendas and the social expectations and go to the people themselves and listen to their stories and then using those stories as leverage for social change. So, I just wanted to say that even what you do is in the UK, a North European country, the parallels to what we do in Palestine are profound. Sorry, it wasn't a question, it was just a note. Okay, thank you Jonathan Stanczak. Another comments, yes, because of live streaming it would be better to come. Sorry, don't be, the others don't be intimidated by this fact to come here. Hi, I also come from a UK context and what I hear what you're saying Jonathan is a warning actually about the dangers of academic hegemony that speak to a very narrow perspective on what their role is in society. Their comments about what you were doing, oh for crying out loud, it's so insulting and so agist, if you were an art student at Goldsmiths doing exactly what you did I think it would have been perceived with a very different attitude but you are who you are in your position and that was clearly seen to be threatening and irresponsible so your colleagues sound like they need to get out more And there's something about the disciplinary board is of academic study which can dangerously lead to this very narrow thinking which doesn't help an integrated approach to social change. That's all I want to say. Well, yes, thank you for this very interesting presentation. I have a kind of critical question but I hope you understand it's in the mood of solidarity. So I'm also sometimes involved in projects like yours which are small and I like that but at some points I'm wondering if you're kind of preaching to the converted somehow that you know we kind of stay in family so to say we talk about issues which are of relevance to us but at the same time we should maybe present them to somebody who is not of our opinion and I'm wondering how you deal with this problem with which I cannot deal. These three micro-fests are part of the first year of discovery as I was saying finding out working from what is a very confused public arena. I wouldn't call it a cultural public sphere. There isn't one. It's a nice word. I love the phrase cultural public sphere as if there is some kind of coherent sphere of communication and dialogue within the cultural sector. I certainly not where I am. So your point is a very important one and I'd say I'd start to think about that now, a year later reflecting on our year of activities and thinking about next year's fests. Very, very important. Who are these people? The last festival being based in the space of a part of the city was probably one place in which the participation was so open and unpredictable and random. We really did have all kinds of people that we would never imagine or would have invited. That was even a city councilor and somebody who just arrived from Somalia. A real extraordinary range of people. Again, that random participation does not itself constitute agency. So we're now thinking of precisely this issue but a very, very important one. Thank you. Luis from Barcelona. Thank you for your presentation. It really was very, very interesting. My concern is on how do we feed from these micro events, these micro experiments, these labs, the conventional artists or the people who tries to survive in the artistic world with a lot of problems at the same time. So how do we combine avant-garde art or people who tries to do things and to invest in this communitarian kind of experiments that they might feel is not the most useful issue for their careers? I'm thinking from a point of view of cultural, urban cultural policy. And I'm having my examples in my city. So what happens when a community center is closed? It's just door-to-door to an art factory where avant-garde artists try to do things. And sometimes there is just, oh, these communitarian people, the associations of the neighborhood, they do these very bad quality things. And so we are obliged to share the space. But just the idea to be together, physically together, helps. And the decision of building and using these spaces is part of the cultural policy of the city. So how do we convince these leading groups and their specific relationship with cultural policy, civil servants or politicians and so on, the people who take decision, in the sense that not to cut this, because in our society we try to separate. Okay, this is social work. We need to do that. Okay, but these are things of art. And it's not easy. And maybe our role is to real legitimize communitarian art as something very important for today's societies. More questions, and then you can wrap up the answers. Milena wanted to ask. And I would like, Deanna, come, Milena, to come to tell what yesterday evening we discussed about this year's bit of going to the main halls, why it was important. For the first, thank you very much for your very comprehensive presentation and the different points of view. I think that I am sharing thoughts of all of us. And just my thought is what do you think and perhaps have some suggestions how to involve all social changes, anonymous art of revolution into sustainable development of culture and basic human rights. Perhaps could be one. Would it be more simple? Yes. Thank you, Milena. Deanna and then Christina. Thank you for your presentation, first of all. We were discussing yesterday during the conference in the morning about this very important question of the use of the space because bit of was known specially, I mean I think through its history of using the outdoor spaces, unusual venues, unusual from sellers, garages, to factories, the markets and so on and so on. And so some voices yesterday were heard from the prominent artists and people involved from the beginning in bit of that they felt that this edition of bit of actually somehow missed that aspect because all of the performances or projects were put in very mainstream theaters including bit of theater as well. And I contributed with another perspective because mostly all performances we saw during this edition of the bit of were very politically bold, clear, and performances that would be probably put in different context in clubs, in sellers, in special places and so on. And then what would be achieving would be exactly what was just heard, preaching to convert it. So I thought that this edition of bit of had this subversive aspect in the best possible way by putting the projects that by its content and the sense were somehow seen or obliged to be in unusual or unconventional places by putting them in national theater, in atelier, in Yugoslav drama theater, so on and so on, even in Madelineanum tonight, because this is the way how we can maybe impact the broader community and the broader society because people who would never come to some seller would come to national theater and then be exposed to the work that they would be never seeing otherwise and maybe something would be triggered in them for the change. And then another very important aspect of this year's bit for me was inviting migrants to the national theater to see the piece from two nights ago, excellent piece, that again, the all artists here, many of us had this experience of going to the people, going to migrants, going to the bus station to perform or do projects with them and so on, but also they want to feel as citizens, they want to feel as the part of community and by inviting them to come to the theater and, I mean, providing the tickets for them, I think it was an excellent way how to, I mean, the small step but important how to find the space for them. My theater and myself had the opportunity to perform all around the region and more or less the world and very often we performed for the special groups of women in Bosnia like mothers of Srebrenica and so on and so on in very unusual places. But when they come here to Belgrade, we invited them many times, they're asking like, can we go to theater? Can we go to see? Can we go get the ticket and go to the theater? So this is just something that... Yeah, I mean, not because they love our work, we correspond with them and so on, they come to a dark theater that is in kind of the crazy space of the school and so on, so absolutely not the theater space, but they want to come to the concert hall, they want to come to the concert hall, they want to come to the theater and so on. So I think that the subversiveness of today's work in the best possible sense could be in not really making this kind of the, let's say, ghettos. Like this is the space where we go to work with refugees and perform for them and this is the mainstream and this is that, but in like bigger exchange. Thank you. Thanks, Jonathan, for sharing extremely intriguing experiences. I have a comment and question regarding especially the third example. You shared this storytelling person. I found very interesting the decision you had taken to take a performance on the move, walking, instead of what to theater you go and sit. And the other question is how did you pick this person? Who was the storyteller? What stories would this person tell and how was the connection made? Because it spontaneously, it recalled a memory that, for instance, the London Kobyshoffs of the Methodist Church, they would do exactly that once a year to really go to their parishes and seek contact. And the second question to all festivals is because I also read that as an effort to create a new understanding of citizenship in the city. Really making the city itself aware how much it's changing. So this led me to the question in the sense of Habermas. What is really also the, are there any viable structures which can tell those stories? Because most of our cities do not longer have channels like local newspapers or if they exist they are read by a small portion and not by younger generations. And that might, that was a question, how did you also follow what you were doing to share it with a larger audience? Because I must say I'm impressed to see in, well, Cologne is a city of one million, but they're the local newspaper. Partially they have been adopting very similar approaches like the one you are sharing for years, like spontaneously asking people over a cup of coffee to tell a story. And then this story is taken back in the newspaper. Of course it's a 19th century format. Now it's also done electronically. But I wonder this connection between action plus also communication, mediation where that might lead us. Thank you. Fascinating question. Yes, I'll answer them all right now. Two minutes. Give me two minutes. No, extraordinary talking here as Serhan. You want to say something? Yeah, yeah, come down. Come down. Come down. Just say something. Okay, I will. I mean, I would like to point out not only the micro approach of your presentation, but especially the form of it. I mean, the way you are criticizing and questioning the vocabulary of our established field is utmost important to me. Because if we don't challenge this canon, we risk to make a longer winter sleep in our field. So I do feel that the way you are questioning it and challenging it through, I mean, micro cases rather than macro cases. It's very much important to liaise with different areas and sectors. Thank you. Thank you. Excellent. On that point, there's a big price to pay professionally for this kind of questioning. Because, I mean, I have a whole sort of sphere of academic colleagues, not in my center. I must say my center is a very supportive and open-minded unit. But I'm talking about the broader field of academia and scholars. I could seriously damage my reputation through getting involved in things like this. If I tell them, hey, this is about cultural diplomacy, they'll think, that sounds good. Just avoid the words like community or anything social. There's no cachet professionally. Yes, you won't get funding, you won't get promoted, all those professionals in that. So that's absolutely important. And Sehan, talking about vocabulary, we are the language we use, the terms we use. I mean, Wittgenstein, you know, my language is my world. That's how we construct our realities. And that's why I think we should go to the political philosophy of what we are saying. And a part of my paper is about ideology, how it's become so unfashionable to talk about ideology at a point where it's become so necessary. But ideology has changed, the way it functions has changed. We prefer to use words like discourse because they have more mobility. But we need to revise our concept of ideology because there is so much ideology. When I meet with a radical artist in my city and he sits down and starts talking about return on investment, I know we've got an ideology problem. But what is that problem? Is it his fault? I mean, is there some kind of divide? And that comes with the question of the art field. Is it about big bad institutions and all us radicals out there in the social housing estates with the refugees? No, I don't think so. We have to be very careful. Institutions like theaters and museums are there because they have been hard-won spaces over the last 150 years. They are, if you like, a kind of evidence that enlightened modernity has a real traction when talking about economy and society that spaces for art and the institutionalization of art is an incredible achievement within the political economy of our countries. And so we have to celebrate the institutions of culture, not see them as some kind of embodiment of repressive power, but at the same time, you know, the ruse of ideology, it can be so, if you like, permeate everything we do to a point where museums and great theaters can, if you like, find themselves playing an ideological role, even though they're using other language, but they are being positioned within the political economy of culture in an ideological way. And, you know, the young artists can experience them, you know, within their cultural production as a kind of repressive restraint or as a mechanism of exclusion. But we need to be aware of what's happening and the history of what's happening and not demonize people or institutions as if they are the enemy. Some fantastic questions. I mean, on Friday we had a book launch about Jochen Goetz and he maintained something because all through his work since the late 1960s, he uses the medium of the question as one of his prime materials, artistic materials, the conceptual medium of the question. And we had to see questions as articulations of knowledge, not as just a request for a solution or a request for a superior form of knowledge. And so all of these questions that have just been articulated are, if you like, very important embodiments of knowledge in their own right. And so I kind of come at them not with some superior form of knowledge, but as my own response, which might be another question. But this is important to understand the process of critical thinking which I think is kind of dissolving because public policy frameworks don't want questions. They want solutions to already defined problems. Like mention the word refugee, problem. Why? Why are we thinking of refugee as problem? You know, these words can create cognitive frameworks in which we immediately situate people within a public policy context. You know, refugee problem. How about refugee as something else? Refugee as creative. What would that do to our understanding of refugee as a concept? So those are the kind of things we need to sort of consider. These other questions and Professor Bonnet, who talked about, you know, okay, I'm at the one end outside of the art sphere of our production. You know, what about everybody else? I'm looking towards the city council thinking of how my political agency can somehow engage in diplomatic relations and if you like forward an agenda for East-West, which is an intercultural international agenda. What about everybody else? Well, I would say that, you know, within that dialogue, there's a space in which other people can contribute on their own terms. But I think what I've found is where we are locating the material conditions of space and people and actions, the material conditions of, you know, speaking, you know, within a policy framework of issues that should matter to authority. And I think everyone needs to do that wherever they are. Spaces. My city doesn't have these great informal spaces like, you know, the Helsinki Cable Factory or, you know, great spaces for artists and creative, whatever. And we don't have that. We have a very, very small artistic community which has very few resources. So we don't have a huge breadth of actors. We have just small select quite insecure organizations. But I think that's a very important point in how we, and this is something Jochen Gertz does, how we get a sense of multitude as agency without formal organization. Because the one, you know, you start setting up associations of representation or structuring organizations to represent all the artists of the city and such and such. You know, that has a role. But, you know, you create a different set of political questions there. So there's a way of how to mediate the multitude of the artistic sphere without mechanisms of domination which are structures of formal organization. Because they are, in fact, not an organization but a whole spectrum of different kinds of actors and agencies. Sustainable development and the culture of human rights. Wow, well, if I could answer that, I'd be working for the UN, wouldn't I, really? But, yeah, absolutely. If we want to talk about the large frameworks of cultural diplomacy and, you know, what they're actually engaged in promoting and representing around the world. Yet, absolutely, we need to reconcile ourselves to these concepts. I mean, what does sustainable development actually mean for culture? Is it just, you know, would it happen if the government said, right, all artists and arts organizations will get funded until the end of time? I mean, what is sustainability? You know, because it's very difficult for us to step out of the question of finance and money. Because that's the neoliberal trap we're all in. And it becomes a cognitive matter about how we think about sustainability. So let's think about sustainability as, if you like, a process of dialogue and agency, not economics. And for human rights, yes. That's a whole different issue. I'll actually refer to it in my paper. You know, Slavoj Zizek's Against Human Rights Essay. Very interesting looking at the ideological positioning of human rights as a kind of right without politics. Very, very interesting. And lastly, the use of space, institutional, I've dealt with that. Yeah, the spaces and stepping outside the institutionalized spaces of art. Very, very important, you know, the street, the housing estates, locating those other spaces. But as I said at the start, not somehow denigrating the institutionalized spaces of the theater. Because institutions are in the world in which we live one of the most powerful forms of political agency. If you're an institution, you do have a certain kind of power of discourse that other organizations outside don't. So I think let's not denigrate them. They're hard-won spaces. Thank you very much.