Analog-blog no more! Part one: Bristol

Georgie here, writing from my travels, a research trip investigating Artist-Run-Initiatives in the UK (and other places) before heading over to ANTI Festival in Kuopio, Finland, to present a performance and mapping project, Kansas that I made with Malcolm Whittaker. More about Mal here, and ANTI, here.

Thus far, my grand plans of being a super-blogger abroad have been thwarted by activity and inconsistent internet access. I have however been thinking about blogging and writing in a notebook (not really the idea is it?). So, I am now catching up, starting from the beginning, trying to find sense and significance in my scrawlings to share with the big interwebbed world. I'll try and break things up with titles so you can skip to the bits you might be interested in.

BRISTOL.

Malcolm and I travelled to Bristol the day I arrived in the UK and were met by Sylvia Rimat - who we have been corresponding with about Malcolm's a lover's discourse project, which began as part of the ClubHouse program at Performance Space and will culminate in a live exchange with artists in Bristol, at Arnolfini, as part of You and Your Work 8, which Sylvia founded and co-curates (more on that later, but there is a link to some information if you just can't wait), and LiveWorks, at Performance Space in Sydney. Sylvia welcomed us on our first evening, and over a couple of glasses of wine our conversation traversed a broad range of topics which may or may not be relevant or interesting to you, readers, but, probably for the best, for all of us, my notes are not so comprehensive as to be able to even begin to transcribe much of it. What stuck with me about these first conversations, with Sylvia and subsequently a number of other visual and performance artists in Bristol and across the UK, is a sense of impending doom in relation to projected government arts funding cuts. Ignorant as I may be, in Australia I felt fairly unaffected by the Global Financial Crisis - for such hype, media attention and the household use of "GFC" as a term, honestly, my life did not feel that different. It seems that the reach of the GFC however, is broadening far beyond the walls of financial institutions and government treasuries, towards artists and arts organisations who wait with bated breath to find out about the scale of further funding cuts in the coming years. Read The Guardian theatre blog to find out more about the reaction to an initial round of funding cuts. Much as there is debate about arts funding in Australia (if only within the arts community itself), this ubiquitous sense of foreboding is not one that I have witnessed back home. I'm not sure if this silence about arts policy in the recent election and the subsequent risk in unpredictable governmental policy agendas is actually any better, or if, perhaps, everyone talks about it less? I am finding it difficult to write about this without acknowledging my somewhat privileged position of funded travel, and the uneven distribution of funding between artforms, "emerging" and "established" artists, and the fact that, although I have many opinions, I haven't the best sense of history as I'm new to this game. Perhaps if you have a thought you could comment?