Little moments of atmosphere

Although I’ve been working on culture-related projects for a few years now, I have always considered myself to be someone who hasn’t really drunk the koolaid of the creative economy.  For sure, there’s plenty of good stuff going on, but there’s a lot of nonsense too and a lot of people believing their own mythology.

Hence when Arshad and I went down to Digbeth for a meeting with Phil Hession yesterday I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but was prepared to be broadly cynical.  Phil is in Birmingham for a few short weeks with a residency based at Grand Union.  He’s built a splendidly Heath Robinson contraption which enables him to record audio onto CDs by etching them with a nail, much like cutting a groove on a record:

He’s been experimenting with this device, taking it out into Digbeth and recording ambient noises, snatches of stories and songs as well as some of his own singing.  Each CD contains about 2 minutes of recording and can be played back on a standard record player.  The playback sound is very like early wax cylinder recordings, lots of crackle and noise, space and atmosphere, all underpinned by the rhythmic cranking of the mechanical arm used to drive the cutting of the CD.

Phil sings very beautifully, demonstrating the process to Arshad and myself by making a recording of him singing in the studio space.

This is genuinely joyful stuff.  What struck me, however, was that this was almost the opposite of cultural intermediation.  Phil hadn’t really worked out what he wanted to do with the recordings or even, really, why he was doing them at all other than the fact that he could and that it was kinda cool.

He’s got a show coming up in Digbeth in early March.  Definitely worth checking out.

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Diversity in the city, University of Lisbon, Conference

Tags

arts, City, Creative economies, Creativity, diversity, Intermediation, Lisbon, migration, religion, segregation

Dr Jennifer McGarrigle organised an excellent conference in Lisbon on 26th and 27th June, which I was fortunate enough to be part of. The conference theme Diversity in the City: Shifting realities and ways forward brought together international researchers looking at issues of migration, integretation, segregation and spatial encounter in the context of plurality. I gave a paper in the session on Migrants and the Arts which came out of the current cultural intermediation workpackage underway in Balsall Heath, Birmingham. Taking a community-centred approach, the paper proposed that research needs to capture creativity in marginalised and peripheral spaces in the creative economy, including ESOL classes, places of workship and the domestic scene, to effectively insert diverse migrant experiences of culture and arts into funding and governance structures. Unexpectedly and fortuituously, one of the keynote speakers, Dr Richard Gale (University of Cardiff) delivered a fascinating paper using social-spatial network analysis in the very same area to investigate neighbourhood interaction and friendship. In the context of negative UK public discourse on segregation and conservative Islam, both papers and the wider conference attended to various sites where connectivity across ethic-religious groups takes place.

Lisbon isn’t a bad spot to spend a couple of days either…

Middleware and open data

Just a quick one.  Last week the project multitouch group met to discuss moving forward with the development of the project website and multitouch interface.  The upshot of the conversation was that Russell has commited to building a ‘middleware’.  Essentially we have our project data stored in a database for use in a program called ‘NVivo’ which is used for analysing qualitative data.  Russell’s team are going to build some code to allow this database to be searched from outside the program and then call up the data tagged with different themes.  While the middleware itself won’t be pretty to look at (little more than a search box), we’ll then be able to layer on top of that some more attractive and intuitive interfaces suitable for web and touch devices.

This is very exciting and links to a meeting I was at last week in Southampton as part of the HESTIA2 project, which was considering issues of linked and open data.  One of the conditions of research council funding these days is that you make your data open to all.  Traditionally this has meant putting things like interview transcripts in an online repository.  This is fine, but it means that people accessing your data don’t get any sense of the analysis that you have done – tagging different pieces of text and images against different themes.  The middleware that Russell’s team are building will actually make both the data and, crucially, our analysis, both open and linkable, which is a very exciting prospect.

Reflections on the ECE 6th Conference, University of Toronto, and Artscapes, University of Kent

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Art, Birmingham, cities, communities, conference, connected, Creative economies, geography, Intermediation, Policy, Richard Florida, Toronto

At the end of summer term the academic calendar segues into conference season. First was the ECE 6^th Conference at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), University of Toronto from 18-21^st June. A highly stimulating yet exhausting programme ran from 8.30am till we had finished up to 7 courses of our dinners (around 9.30pm, depending on stamina). The conference was designed as a way to bring early career academics together from around the world in a process of field-rebuilding on the creative economy.  Generosity of funding by MPI enabled early career academics with limited or non-existent research budgets to attend – although Canadian immigration prevented two of the speakers joining us in person (Ammar Palik, Pakistan, and Andrés Goméz-Liévano, Colombia).

Richard Florida gave his time to meet one-on-one with each of the participants as part of a game in academic speed-dating. He also led a discussion on revisiting the creative class where he rightfully noted that 100s of trillions is invested in urban spending and urban practice therefore focus needs to be concentrated on how spending is translated into pragmatic strategy. Casinos, stadiums and bike lanes are not, of course, the simple solution. Issues of inequality and disadvantaged communities in urban space were discussed in the session and throughout the conference, with common agreement that the pay and conditions for the service sector were unacceptable. A set of fascinating papers ensued. In particular I was impressed by the potential of Dr Xingiian Liu’s data visualisations which showed how creative cities are networked in terms of level of workers and interdependence.

The next week it was onto a very different but interesting conference Artscapes: Urban Art and the Public at the University of Kent, 27-28th June. As an example of where site-specificity falls down, Dr Rob Knifton discussed David Mach’s Polaris (1983) which was set on fire by a protester on Southbank who suffered fatal burns. The paper recalled the type of intense public participation, and ‘radical decommissioning’, that artist Simon Pope articulates in the burning of Raymond Mason’s Forward in Birmingham City Centre in 2003 (see my artist talk with Simon here). Of particular note was an excellent keynote talk by Dr Jonathan Vickery which read Jochen Gerz’s 2-3 Strassen in relation to creative cities literature.  Vickery’s consideration of how culture in public space has to map itself onto broad objectives of governance and government usefully brought together the strands of thinking from both conferences which feed into our governance work. Exploring culture as a function of policy is one of our lines of thinking, and, taking a multi-level approach, in the next academic year we will be working with communities to learn more about how they connect into cultural and creative practice. More on this soon.

From Cape Town to London via Leeds and Birmingham

Tags

climate, environment, formal governance, international poverty

So much for sustainability, I seem to have spent a lot of time recently in transit, one way or another.

In March I was fortunate enough to travel to Cape Town with one of SURF’s other streams of work – the Greater Manchester Local Interaction Platform for Sustainability. Organised by the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, the meeting brought together partners in Sweden, Kenya, UK and South Africa who are all working towards greater collaboration for sustainable cities as part of the Mistra Urban Futures centre. Unlike the usual conference, where you are locked in airless rooms for days on end, our hosts had thought to locate the meetings in different places around the Cape – including the spectacular Kirstenbosch Gardens and a visit to Phillipi, one of the largest townships in Cape Town.

Phillipi was a sobering place – a township of up to 500,000 people, many living in poverty, in cramped and crowded conditions, where deaths from unstable electricity supplies and summer fires rampaging through the densely packed dwellings are unimaginably high. A far cry from the kinds of poverty that we see in the U.K. Nonetheless – as became apparent during the panel debate I participated in “Fair Cities for International Poverty Reduction” – the generic issue of who holds the ‘right to the city’ cuts across both very different contexts. During my talk, I was able to draw on our Greater Manchester work. I highlighted how little deprived communities are engaged with formal governance structures and how poverty is only selectively prioritised within different policy frameworks. The failure of service-sector led economic growth in the 1990s and the parallel creative boom in addressing these issues is a key starting point for our project.

Fresh from Cape Town and the scorching heat (experienced only fleetingly in-between some serious work), a few days later I forced my way across the Pennines in the snow to Leeds. There, I attended a seminar held by the Sustainable Practices Research Group on the Uses and Abuses of Community for Sustainable Development. Not directly about the creative urban economy. Nor specifically about cities. But what was interesting was how the common issues surrounding the lack of connectivity – between formal and informal governing and how communities are conceptualised as targets rather than participants in policy formulation and implementation – cut across policy areas.

Onwards then the next week to Birmingham for the Project Continuity Day. Phil has already blogged about the day as a whole and what’s going on in the different workpackages. We did have a particularly fruitful discussion about different governance questions with a few themes reoccurring:
• The relative importance and value of formal structures and policy frameworks and informal or ‘organic’ forms of organisation
• The extent to which creative industries/culture are given priority in the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), the relative power of the LEPs and the impact of the abolition of the Regional Development Agencies
• The confidence of the two cities in articulating their distinctiveness – and the impact that rhetoric has on practice and vice versa
• The different ways in which the city-regional agenda are impacting on questions of territoriality – and questions of political stability
• The role of infrastructure and ‘nodes’ for creative industries to come together to collaborate or otherwise share ideas and how non-formal and non-traditional spaces may provide alternatives
• The extent to which creative urban policies and regeneration policies are merged and blurred – and whether and how this is problematic, for whom?
• The differences in the stories we tell about the development of the creative urban economy in each city – and whose interests those stories serve?

A very brief overview of a short, but packed set of discussions which we will take back into our respective cities to continue to inform the research.

And so to London to meet with Yvette Vaughan-Jones, Visiting Arts, one of our main partners on the project. Yvette has been with the team since the start – attending the sandpit back in December 2011 and we were delighted to have her batting on our side in the highly competitive process that followed. As one of the co-commissions in workpackage 5, Visiting Arts will be developing a project, drawing on their tried and tested Square Mile framework. 1mile² has inspired communities to explore the cultural and ecological diversity of their neighbourhoods through artistic engagement. Artists and ecologists collaborate and lead activity that enables vital dialogue and knowledge sharing within and between cultural and geographic communities. Launched in 2009, the programme has so far involved 42 artists, 18 ecologists, 14 creative organizations and reached over 13 500 people in 10 countries.

To take this forward into the Cultural Intermediation project we have decided to work with Visiting Arts on a pre-commissioning study to look at best practice for artist residencies and socially engaged artistic practice. Combined with a proposed seminar in the CIRCUS and some preliminary work in Greater Manchester, the partnership promises an exciting test-bed to cut across the work packages on governance, community, evaluation and co-commissioning. More information to follow…

The Big Tent Activate Summit, Delhi, India

Tags

Art, cities, communities, Creative economies, Delhi, digital, google, guardian, India, Intermediation, internet

Organised by Google, The Guardian and MediaGuru. 21 March 2013.

In March 2013, I was invited by United Kingdom Trade & Investment to attend a summit on the future of digital and media in India as an expert on the creative economy. The Big Tent Activate Summit, held at the Taj Palace Hotel, Delhi, was financially underwritten by Google along with The Guardian and MediaGuru, an Indian media services company. A short statement from the organisers explained the agenda was to “discuss and debate the impact of the Internet on the Indian economy, politics, media and culture.” Marking the first Summit to be held in India, Eric Schimdt (CEO of Google) and Alan Rusbridger (Editor of The Guardian) talked alongside politicians, media specialists, economists, academics, digital entrepreneurs and, to a lesser extent, marginalised groups and individuals. Weaving a somewhat problematic path through commercial gains to be made by big business and digital as a force for challenging inequalities in India, the summit nevertheless raised some interesting issues.

There are 150 million internet users in India. However, despite appearing huge in comparison to UK metrics, this figure only represents 12% of the Indian population. Of this 12%, the majority are on narrowband with just 1% estimated to have broadband. By point of comparison, the US has 80% penetration and UK 73% penetration (in market-speak). The internet effects how we work, govern, bank, learn and entertain. Furthermore, it has the capabilities to transform how we communicate with each other. As Kapil Sibal, Minister for Communication and Information Technology, told delegates the internet ‘allows communities to talk to each other’. Yet Section 66 was widely discussed by panellists as a curtailment of the democratic freedom of expression with divergent opinions on whether this was justified to prevent violent protests and killings in the most extreme of cases. Despite low usage, Ministers Omar Abdullah and Shashi Tharoor did agree that social media, and Twitter especially, was increasingly taken seriously in politics due to their power to influence as well as amplify volatile subjects.

In regards to equality, Sibal and Schimdt urged the Indian state to ensure wireless networks and fibre optics were installed so that everyday people can reach information. Further, devices must also be affordable, in particular smart mobile phones. Interestingly, 3/4^th of the growth in internet usage has been through mobile and tablet therefore web publishers targeting Indian markets need to consider small screen experience with low text, in contrast to the big screen computer experience we were first introduced to in the UK.

Innovative battery-operated education labs used in rural villages were showcased, which took ZAYA, a mobile and digital learning experience, to areas that lack text books and sometimes electricity. A breakout session at lunch by Radar also showed how technology could support marginalised groups through the usage of simple text messaging as a means of citizen reporting in politically, socially and geographically isolated areas. Dalat women were amongst those who shared their stories with Rusbridger, eventually getting past hotel security only with help from the organisers, demonstrating the caste system still shapes everyday experiences in India.

During my 5 day visit I also had the chance to pay a visit to Sarai which is part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies located in north Delhi. Sarai in an interdisciplinary research centre which runs the Media City Research project and Cybermoholla. These are digital labs located in neighbourhoods in Delhi aimed at connecting with diverse socio-economic groups and young people; echoing some of our community engagement priorities in Birmingham and Manchester on the Cultural Intermediation project. Also Sarai’s environment is itself a case study of a cultural intermediary, connecting creative practice, theory and political action from its position within a megacity in the global south. I was very impressed by my brief visit to Sarai and hope to start a conversation with the academics and practitioners based there on our shared interests going forward…

Project Continuity Day and other meetings

A busy week of workshops in the run up to the Easter break.  On Monday myself, Saskia and Kerry were invited to a workshop run by Catherine Durose of INLOGOV here at the University of Birmingham.  The theme was ‘How can research help policy?’ and was an opportunity to hear more about the Connected Communities Policy Reviews which Catherine among others have been undertaking.  Sue Hanshaw, the ARHC’s lead for Connected Communities tackled the central theme – just how can arts and humanities research help policymakers.  This kicked off a really interesting day of reflection and discussion about the nature of Arts & Humanities research, both methodologically and epistemologically.  The theme of co-production was prominent as were issues of scale – if, for example, making pots can do a great deal for wellbeing, is it the haptic knowledge of actually working with clay that the policy maker needs, or something more abstracted from embodied practice?  Fascinating stuff and great to meet Dave Prytherch to discuss these issues.  We also learned about ‘slide packs’ which have apparently become the prefered mode of communication between civil servants.  Digesting all your findings down to a handful of tightly packed PowerPoint slides is a skill in itself for academics more used to the more leisurely spaces of a written report.  And a touch intimidating too.

On Tuesday myself, Antonia and Richard were at a workshop kicking off the University of Birmingham’s new major theme for its Institute of Advanced Studies – regeneration economies.  Antonia and Richard gave highly engaging talks as part of a session thinking about joining up social science, arts, legal and engineering approaches to build knowledge and skills for the future of regional economic growth.  The regeneration economies theme will be the basis for a whole series of workshops run over the next 18 months by my colleagues Lauren Andres (Geography) and John Bryson (Business School) and it was really great to see postgrads and masters students involved in this right from the beginning.

The main event of the week (naturally!) was our Project Continuity Day.  These six monthly meetings are always a great way to catch up with what everyone is doing and start to see the connections between the different work packages that we’re working on.  What was particularly exciting was to see how Ian and Natasha’s work on the historical evolution of intermediation was playing against the work that Beth, Karen and Saskia have been doing on contemporary governance – not least with the ‘Big Story’ interviews that Natasha and Saskia have been undertaking with people who have a long perspective on culture within Birmingham and Manchester.  Similarly Dave presented about the possibility of using participatory evaluation on the intervention work package.  This approach, which gets participants to design and implement their own evaluation of the project they’re involved in has a lot of resonances with the co-construction and co-commissioning of the interventions that we’re planning.  Indeed, Paul’s discussion of how the ‘Communities’ workpackage will operate has made it clear that we need to start thinking about the interventions (particularly training of community participants) at a very early stage.  Myself, Dave and Paul have resolved to meet after Easter to start a conversation about this.

We had a really productive set of small group discussions about the findings from the Governance workpackage thus far.  In my group we were thinking about the different attitudes between the two case study cities – Chris Jam and Jo Johnston noting the great confidence of Manchester about its cultural offer, which contrasts so strongly with attitudes in Birmingham.  It was also great to hear from Tim about his reflexive project – thinking  about how researchers actually function when undertaking projects and how these practices then shape the research itself.  This of course segues neatly into Laura’s PhD – Laura was presenting for the first time at Wednesday’s meeting and it was really interesting to hear about her background and what she’s been up to.  And we should also welcome Tania to the team, who’s going to be working with Antonia on a PhD about IP in the context of the creative economy (just as soon as we’ve finished sorting out the paperwork for getting her started!).  I had a really interesting chat with her over lunch about just how often IP is being raised in lots of Connected Communities meetings as being a critical issue to think through – her PhD has the potential to have a huge impact on debates within the Connected Communities group.

In the afternoon we had an opportunity to enter Richard’s lair/Batcave – do.collaboration.  This is a great resource at the university with a huge number of large touchtable interfaces to play with.  Richard, Russell and our graphic designer Brigitte were asking us to think through ways in which we can build tagging frameworks within the data (transcripts, films, audio, pictures) which can then be explored via a touchtable interface and, indeed, in a more detailed way on our website.  This is particularly exciting because our server was being installed on  Thursday so we’ll be up and running with building our project database by the end of the Easter break.  Ultimately for all the “boys toys” elements of this side of the project, the fundamental point is to give people access to our findings in ways that a normal/static website wouldn’t really do.  I’m particularly excited by the visual ways of drilling down into different data and identifying connections.  Once we have the server up and running, Russell and Brigitte are going to start building pilot versions of the interface – hopefully so we have something tangible to look at by the next project continuity day (date to be confirmed!).

Connected Communities Showcase

On Tuesday I was at the Connected Communities Showcase event down in London.  This was an opportunity for people involved in the exceedingly varied Connected Communities projects to talk to people about their work. The event was keynoted (if that is a word) by David Willetts, the Minister for Universities and Science, who said some generally enthusiastic things and then was whisked away leaving us mere mortals to it.

I spent a bit of time on a stand with one of my postgrads, Colin Lorne, talking to people about my MapLocal project.   Colin took a break from his PhD to be the research assistant on this project that we undertook with Chris Speed from Edinburgh and Cultural Intermediation’s own Antonia Layard.  MapLocal excited a fair bit of interest and gave me a chance to talk to a lot of people interested in mapping as a tool for representing/tapping into the creativity of communities.  This included some really exciting work by Peter Insole from Bristol City Council with the Know Your Place project

It was really intriguing day out and was also the launch platform for five major new AHRC/ESRC-funded Connected Communities projects:

• Dementia and Imagination: connecting communities and developing well-being through socially engaged visual arts practice, led by Dr Gillian Windle at Bangor University £1.2m.
• Representing Communities: developing the creative power of people to improve health and well-being, led by Professor Gareth Williams at Cardiff University, £1.2m.
• Creative Practice as Mutual Recovery: connecting communities for mental health and well-being led by Professor Paul Crawford at Nottingham University, £1.2m.
• The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: Imagining different communities and making them happen led by PI Professor Graham Crow at the University of Edinburgh, £1.9m.
• Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement led by Dr Morag McDermont, Bristol University, £1.9m.

(See the AHRC press release for more details)

Keri Facer and George McKay, the Connected Communities fellows organised a meeting between the Principal Investigators of these and the other large projects – including the creative economy call of which we are a part.  In what turned out to be a refreshingly honest meeting, we had a really good chat about the pressures and problems of managing very large projects and the potentials for collaboration between them.

One potential element for collaboration is the fact that we are planning on creating an interface that connects our project database (which we are creating in a piece of analysis software called NVivo) to our website (and touchtable).  This idea produced some excited interest among other PIs – all we have to do now is figure out a way to do it – over to Russel Beale on that one!  One of the most important recent events from that point of view is that, after many (many) delays, our project server has finally arrived.  I was expecting this would be a small black box that would sit in a cupboard somewhere but it turns out to be a huge tower taller than me (and I’m 6’4″!).  Apparently our University IT team needed spare rack capacity and so used our project as an excuse to buy a new rack cabinet.  I’m hoping that when plugged in it will have a large glowing red eye a la HAL.  Boys toys.

The cultural value of finding time for research…

Of course, as scholars, we do have other lives/commitments outside of this project.  Recently, in my Department here at the University of Birmingham, we’ve had a number of staff move on to other posts.  This has created some exciting opportunities for new recruitment and building from a really good core team of people.  In the meantime, however, it has meant that we’ve got some administrative headaches to deal with.  I’ve been asked to take on the role of joint research group leader for human geography, responsible for shaping the recruitment strategy for new colleagues as well as drafting relevant sections of our submission to the Research Evaluation Framework (REF) which determines funding for UK universities in the coming years.

The upshot of this is that on a personal level, I’ve been incredibly busy over the last few months.  And this is why it’s always good to get out doing research-related things to remind yourself about the fun bit of this job.

On Wednesday I had a meeting at the Darkroom in the Old Print Works with Dan Burwood and Andrew Jackson who are, among other things, fine art photographers.  I’ve worked with Dan before on projects and have long been a fan both of his work and his approach to photography.  Both he Andrew have a commitment to community and participatory modes of photography and are in the latter stages of an Arts Council bid to do a feasibility study, looking at working with different communities to co-construct a set of photography activities.  This will include a major training element for the community photographers they work with, but also an interest in creating an interface for contextual search and display which has lots in common with the kinds of things we’re trying to achieve with the multitouch outputs from the cultural intermediation project.

Another connection with our project, of course, is that it keys directly into some of the work Natasha and Ian have been doing on the history of community photography in Birmingham and Manchester, particularly in the 1970s/80s.  Listening to Dan and Andrew talking about what they want to achieve with their Arts Council bid (co-construction, arts-based empowerment, innovative digital outputs) struck a great many chords with me and so unsurprisingly I’m enthusiastically supporting their bid.

A second nice research thing I’ve found time for this week was in responding to an invitation to talk about cultural intermediation at the Cultural Value Project workshop hosted yesterday by Geoff Crossick at Birkbeck.  Lots of really interesting papers responding to issues around how culture could/should be valued and how a series of AHRC projects are responding to this.  A whole series of great papers, sadly no time to list them all.  I was particularly struck by the work of Helen Chaterjee, a bioscientist involved in museums work.  She’s been doing fascinating work looking at the psychosocial impacts of object handling with ill people.  What’s been so exciting was to look at the rigorous use of control groups across a series of indicators – i.e. does it make a difference to people’s responses if they’re shown photographs of the objects, versus handling the objects themselves? (It does).  Over coffee she was also telling me about the kinds of control studies they’ve also done for whether it’s relating to heritage particularly that can give these positive psychological effects or whether you could get the same effects just with general social contact.  It seems as though something specific is happening with heritage objects, which is in itself a fantastically important finding.

I was also by Helen Nicholson’s work around gift theory and applied drama – the way that ‘engaged’ theatrical activities still have a loud authorial voice and intentionality, even if these are obfuscated behind a language of empowerment and participation.  Kate McLuskie said some really interesting things about how works that become canonical – Shakespeare in this case – can lend authority in interpretation that goes far beyond the original text.  Because you’re ‘doing’ Shakespeare your work gains a legitimacy it perhaps does not deserve.  Fascinating stuff and a grand couple of days out, but today, back to the grind…

New beginnings

Tags

Art, Birmingham, cities, Creative economies, Hello Culture, Manchester

We travelled to SURF at Salford University on Friday 30^th November to meet with Beth and Karen on the Governance workpackage.  This part of the project will include looking at governance through the role of the state, the rise of cities (so multi-level governance), institutions and knowledge networks. We also discussed the importance of capturing the creative practices of those organisations which are not usually categorised as part of the creative economy, such as the NHS employing video-makers or creating exhibitions. Big Story explorative walking interviews with key creative intermediaries from Greater Manchester and Greater Birmingham will connect the work being done on the Historical workpackage by Natasha and Ian with the mapping of contemporaneous practice by the Manchester and Birmingham researchers (Karen and Saskia).

In other news, Paul Long chaired a workshop on Transforming Cross Innovations as part of the Hello Culture conference on digital technologies, with Steve Harding of Birmingham City University talking on Cross-Innovations and me talking about this project (Custard Factory, 23 November 2012). Beyond a fruitful discussion with delegates on their potential role in the research and the projected outputs of the two projects, I met some interesting practitioners, including Deirdre Figueiredo from Craftspace and Alex Corkindale from mac who I’m following up with.

Thank you to those who have given their time already to be interviewed. In the past fortnight I’ve spoken with:  Debbie Kermode (IKON); Josephine Reichert (Ort); Noel Dunne (Creative Alliance); Dorothy Wilson (mac); Mike Tweddle (BE Festival); Steve Ball (Birmingham REP); Henrietta Lockhart and Adam Jaffer (BMAG).