Reflecting on Aberdeen's first Cultural Summit

Aberdeen’s first Cultural Summit took place at RGU on 3 March, jointly hosted between Robert Gordon University, and the University of Aberdeen. Organisers Dr Jon Blackwood, Research Lead at Gray's School of Art and Professor Eleonora Belfiore, Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Inclusion and Cultural Diversity, reflect on the summit and its significance.

This is a new collaboration which will see an annual summit taking place, with cultural workers, local politicians and decision makers coming together to help strengthen the city’s cultural offer in very challenging times for the sector, locally, nationally, and internationally.

The Summit took place in the same week as the Council’s budget debate, with provision for culture ultimately cut by 20%. With difficult decisions having had to be made, it was important to have the Chief Executive of Aberdeen City Council, Angela Scott, opening the day with a firm commitment to the arts in Aberdeen, despite the pressure the local authority is under to focus expenditure on statutory areas, which do not include culture and the arts.

This was precisely the constructive conversation we had, aided by a range of inspiring speakers; from the curator Rachel Grant, who has built up the independent curatorial practice “Fertile Ground” through a series of exhibitions and interventions made since leaving Gray’s School of Art, through Jon Reid, the well-known cultural activist behind Creative Aberdeen and Nu Art, to Leila Kleineidam, who, from her perspective as a UK civil servant, was able to give insight into how cultural policy has worked in English towns such as Morecambe and Blackpool.

A particularly important moment of reflection was offered by our external speaker, the Midlands-based cultural consultant Lara Ratnaraja, whose presentation offered an outsider perspective on Aberdeen and how it portrays itself to the world. Lara’s presentation was energizing in its identification of the significant potential for creativity and innovation in the city, and galvanising in her call for an inclusive approach to the efforts of supporting creative activity.

We are very happy that we will continue to work with Lara in her role of critical friend of the city, and we are planning to bring her to Aberdeen again, so that artists, curators, and arts administrators and policymakers can benefit from her skills; she will also join us for the second cultural summit to be held at the University of Aberdeen in spring 2024, where we will review the work done over the course of this year and continue to work to build infrastructure and capacity.

Creating opportunities for the city to benefit from external expertise and perspectives is indeed one of our goals in the aftermath of the Summit: our promise was that this would not be the usual academic discussion without follow up. We are very keen to build on the positive energy and desire for collaboration and discussion expressed on the day.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the central concern emerging from the day was around funding, and how to make sure that Aberdeen gets its fair share of investment from bodies such as Creative Scotland, and that what resources are earmarked for the city are invested in the most effective way. Supporting local individual artists and smaller organisations in developing stronger funding applications will be a key area of focus for the coming year.

We are pleased that we will be holding two funding workshops later in the year, one aimed at those who have not written a funding application before, the second aimed at those with previous experience or success who would like to take their work to the next level. Building capacity for the city’s creatives to be successful in attracting funding is a key piece of infrastructure development which we can all take part in, in the year ahead. These events will be listed soon, but will be timed around the Gray’s School of Art degree show.

It is really important for us that we continue the positive momentum and desire to meet and discuss that we had at the summit. In order to facilitate the conversation and the development of new ideas, we will be organising a new series of talks and open forums from the autumn, featuring experienced colleagues from around the UK who have been involved in building cultural events and infrastructure in their own areas. These talks will provide an opportunity to learn from others, build our city’s networks around the country and continue the discussions begun on the 3rd of March.

The Cultural Summit was a key founding event for us, and we both feel the need to make progress quickly on the funding and infrastructure agendas that the day identified as priorities. Building on the great work already being done by many different cultural actors and organisations in the city, we are looking forward to continuing to engage positively and build cultural capacity in our city ahead of the next Cultural Summit at the University of Aberdeenin March 2024. Jon Blackwood (RGU) Eleonora Belfiore (University of Aberdeen) Cultural Summit Co-Organisers.

You can view and comment on the Cultural Summit via this illustration, created by Gray's lecturer, Helen O'Neill: