ABOUT
KALEJDOSKOP is an independent arts platform based in the post-industrial city of Coventry, UK. The full name of this platform is ‘KALEJDOSKOP EAST-WEST’ – the name emerges from Director Emilia Moniszko’s Polish cultural roots, networks, and a response to the range of cultural programs that use the term Kalejdoskop, as well as its semantic meaning (in Polish, beautiful form, but also a spectrum of form, which we take as a visual metaphor for the extraordinary cultural diversity unfolding in Western Europe in our era).
KALEJDOSKOP E-W will not operate with standard organisational frameworks – it is intended to innovate and re-construct what it means to be a cultural organisation in a contemporary European city. To this KALEJDOSKOP communications will:
Use social media in and around the city – to identify and engage with new audiences, communities and sub-cultures – and to contribute to the co-production of urban buzz and cultural information circulating the city.
Create opportunities for networking, hosting other small events (coffee/lunches / nights out), with professionals from small local & regional arts organisations as well as those excluded from culture.
We do not have a management strategy. We organise our events according to a basic philosophy of management, which is interpreted (co-interpreted with participants) with every activity, event and appearance. It can be defines as follows:
Fusion / To make manifest the cultural diversity of contemporary urban realities, and intervene in everyday life, work and social conditions, with contemporary arts.
Collision / To provoke discussion, and be energised by the clash of ideas.
Translation / Of the ordinary experiences of life of Eastern Europeans living in Western Europe.
Adaptation / Illustrating different ways of adaptation through artistic practices – the use of arts as social intervention and as international relations.
Transition / Of contributing to a new impetus for cultural democracy in the city, and defining roles for art in the city’s development – on its own terms.
MISSION
KALEJDOSKOP E-W broadly aims to promote cultural pluralism in the context of the contemporary European city. Its specific mission is to engage with the growing Eastern European population of Coventry, the region and UK, through contemporary art and public dialogue.
KALEJDOSKOP E-W is interdisciplinary, and aims to combine some of the most dynamic aspects of contemporary art and the creative industries with research and public debate. We refer to it as a ‘platform’ – which means that it is both organisation and event, and will maintain a facility for the unpredictable: improvisation, collaboration and participation outside prescriptive policy formulations, cultural institutions, funding regimes and political diktat. KALEJDOSKOP E-W will resist institutionalisation and the forms of incorporation that reduce the power of art as an agent of change.
As an organisation, the priority of KALEJDOSKOP E-W is production, engagement and generating value. As event, its priority is diversity, democracy and participation – in its immediate urban context, supporting the ‘right to the city’ agenda. KALEJDOSKOP E-W works in the context of European Union integration, the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and is inspired by other policy frameworks such as Agenda 21 for Culture. KALEJDOSKOP E-W works for sustainability. ‘Sustainability’ as a policy priority does not mean becoming part of an institutional establishment or success in continued funding or revenues – Sustainability is a fundamental ethic of co-existence in the context of a degrading natural environment. KALEJDOSKOP E-W will make its intellectual, creative and material resources sustainable through collective collaboration, sharing, upcycling and renewable processes, energy conservation and a general resistance to consumption-based values.
Professionally KALEJDOSKOP E-W will act as agent, entrepreneur, creative producer, cultural manager, researcher, consultant and advocate. It both acts alone and in partnership. It uses the term ‘contemporary arts’ as distinct from the institution and market-driven term ‘contemporary art’.
FIELDS
Our activities all revolve around the interrelation between Eastern European culture in Western European cities, innovation, entrepreneurship and urban cultural creativity. KALEJDOSKOP EAST-WEST will have various iterations, depending on its activities. Its first iteration is ‘KALEJDOSKOP EAST-WEST: Emergent Cultural Collaboration.’
KALEJDOSKOP E-W will…
> Act as cultural intermediary for Eastern European residents in Coventry – to facilitate their cultural integration, mobility, representation, interaction and contribution to the life of the city.
> Act as agent for the promotion, exhibition and distribution of contemporary arts, film and urban creativity from Eastern Europe.
> Act as cultural interlocutor between Coventry and ‘twin’ cities and similar artists and intellectuals in Eastern Europe.
> Generate cultural intervention – in policy and politics concerning urban culture, artistic housing and work space, skills and training, entrepreneurship and enterprise, international cultural relations and EU membership.
At the centre of KALEJDOSKOP E-W is communication, social interaction, cultural interconnection, dialogue and intellectual exchange on the following three areas: (i) the cultural politics and ethics of EU integration; (ii) innovation and enterprise – particularly contemporary art and digital media; (iii) urban intervention – the uses of art in the social transformation of the city.
FORMATS
KALEJDOSKOP E-W is framed by a research project that is socially interactive and culturally productive. Within this framework many events will take place. The formats of each event will feature a range of items, verbal, sensory, literary and dialogic – with new combinations of each art form and types of performer or artist.
KALEJDOSKOP E-W will redefine ‘programming’ as itself a creative act: the program is not a static plan, but an act of engagement and responsiveness to the needs of artists, citizens (ex- or potential citizens, like recent immigrants, or refugees) and the city.
The formats will be devised from co-production, support, and encouragement. It aims to feature commissioned artists to create works that contribute to specific debates, dialogues, conversations, issues and concerns.
The formats will document the event, using photography, film and writing. It will be animated by particular questions, and prepared questions for discussion, informing participants and audiences alike; it will facilitate the engagement of an on-going process to identify new contributors, and start the dialogue with contributors, weeks or months prior to an event.
KALEJDOSKOP E-W has already held a major event – in June 2015. KALEJDOSKOP #1 was a micro-festival of cultural intervention – held in partnership with a city NHS mental health delivery agency (called The Pod, and held on the 21-22 June). This micro-festival (of around 100 people and twelve acts) was the basis for a forthcoming program for 2015-16. This program will feature (or develop the capacity to create):
> Public events: interviews, discussion, talks and lectures
> Art: exhibitions, installation and art works
> Media: photography, documentary film, internet
> Research and symposia
> Community and social engagement
MANAGEMENT
We will resist management or marketing terminologies – and will not accept funding if it entails an absorption into a framework of institutionalised corporate management. KALEJDOSKOP E-W does not view marketing as distinct from its creative production, and will use its public or sector-facing communications interface as a means of engagement and participation. Management is similarly integrated into the priority of creative production.
It will initially be run by two directors – Jonathan Vickery and Emilia Moniszko. Oversight will be provided by an International Advisory Board.
International Advisory Board
Bernd Fesel
European Creative Business Network, Rotterdam; senior cultural consultant, Bonn.
Professor Milena Dragićević Šešić
UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy, Belgrade.
Dr Marcin Poprawski
ROK Culture Observatory, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.
Mechtild Manus
Goethe Institute, Munich.
Tsveta Andreeva
European Cultural Foundation, Amsterdam.
Dr Tom Fleming
Tom Fleming Creative Consultancy, London.
Christine Merkel
German Commission for UNESCO, Bonn.