What is it?

A curated deep inquiry into the most urgent challenges faced by cultural and art collectives across European cities. It aims to offer hosts and participants a local/global platform for conversation and access to useful information and support which tends to be unavailable or expensive. For six months, one question per month will convene artists, activists, cultural workers to a local meetup (a community space, a cafe, or even a living room) where they will engage in constructive conversation and draw points of action for mutual support and collaboration at the equivalent of 3 hours / person / month. The meetups are synchronized to address complementary issues.
Members of the Edgeryders Culture Squad take turns to produce and document the events, connect the local stories into a bigger narrative, and connect participants with resources from our network of thousands of people doing cultural work.

Conversations Format

An afternoon/evening at a table conversation with 12-15 participants.

1. Invited guest introduces the inquiry and launches reflection points for the room.
2. Participants offer their personal experience and asks for help as contribution to the theme.
3. The group works together to build a set of actions for collaboration that require no more than 3 hours of work and service by each person who wishes to remain connected to the group.
4. Hosts document the discussion into online posts and commit to connect it to other city events.
5. *Dinner and drinks

The first season of Networked Culture Conversation culminates with a community event: A Performative Dinner to share key findings and celebrate outcomes as we plan for the future.

Example deep inquiry: What is the secure urban place for an artist to work from?

This relates to material infrastructure i.e. access to urban space and buildings; cost and availability of studios to (co-)work from; how the City and key policies affect the ability to work and perform, and many others to be decided.

Others:
How can “authorship” in the arts marry collaboration?
What is the Edge of collaboration in art and science?
How to expand local work into real international collaborations?

Benefits for participants:

• Join a process for discovering progressive ways to improve your work in Culture and the Arts!
• Receive high quality materials about the solutions others have found in their city
• Your project and plea featured in a global community of 4500+ like-minded and supporting peers working in culture, on https://edgeryders.eu/culture-squad
• An invitation to join our Performative Dinner in one of the cities, closing the first season of our conversations.
• Good food, drinks, and dinner talks.

Benefits for hosts and producers:

• Build a tight community and make it a resource for new work, projects, collaborations
• Become a cultural network node in your city.
• Learn about community building using an online platform and digital conversation techniques

Where?

We start with Bedford, Berlin, Brussels, Yerevan and Athens.

How do we start?

A member of the Culture Squad partners up with an active local group or organisation and asks them to co-host the event. They formulate together the deep inquiry and propose a list of invitees and participants, roll out the invite (with request to register to the Culture Squad - mailing list or signup on edgeryders.eu), meet people and document on edgeryders.eu what comes out of the conversation.

Who’s behind this?

The Edgeryders Culture Squad is connecting groups across Europe and beyond to develop shared practices and deploy art and culture for social change. Due to our geographic spread and using an international community platform, we make it cheap for people to connect in new ways and access resources together.