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Cultural governance - responsibilities of European Capitals of Culture Patras 2006

 

This presentation was given at the ECCM General Assembly held in Patras 2006
Hatto Fischer

 

 

 

Let me briefly make at the outset some remarks about the preparatory work done for this meeting here in Patras 2006. It reflects ongoing work ever since the ECCM network held its symposium in Athens in October 2005.

Alone the fact that Spyros Mercouris had to travel 10 times to Patras to secure the contract for the exhibition “20 years of European Capitals of Culture” says already a lot. I went with him three times (5^th of December / 9^th of February / 24^th of February). Indicative of things to come was the last time we went from Athens to Patras. The appointment was scheduled for 11.00, but we were left stranded in the corridor for one and a half hour. During that waiting time no one bothered even to offer us a cup of coffee. In the absence of such a simple gesture I have never seen Spyros hurt as much as at that time. Here was a man kept waiting although as brother of Melina and someone who has spoken to presidents and great personalities, he is someone in need to show some respect. Moreover he is a bundle of energy for everything he does he does it with a great deal of zeal for he has much to offer. This is no little matter if some simple gestures are ignored. May there be whatever differences in interpretation as to the task of a European Capital of Culture, still politeness and hospitality should be its underlying premise.

I had been very critical of Patras 2006 but much more of the non existing discussion within the ECCM Network about the problems of Patras. Because the network received money from Patras to host the members in hotels for this meeting, it is conceivable that they do not wish to be impolite guests. However, it is to be expected that the ECCM network resolves this conflict of interest by staying independent and therefore free to articulate criticism whenever that is needed to preserve the integrity of the institution of European Capital of Culture.

Interestingly another argument was put forward among others by the coordinator Rodolfos Maslias. He stated that any evaluation is impossible as long as the year of implementation is happening; only afterwards can be said something. But to this kind of postponement of a critical stance I would say the network did not really make efforts to inform itself properly as to what was going on in Patras or to put it differently, Patras was let off the hook too easily.

ECCM members did not even realize how long it took for the contract between Spyros Mercouris as honorary president of the ECCM and Patras 2006 to be signed.

It is not difficult to image without contract then no money. Spyros Mercouris was clearly in a huge dilemma in having to do all the work by himself and thus forced to invest own resources without the guarantee that he would be compensated at least later on. Having been beside him throughout these difficult months since October 2005 and the opening of the exhibition in Patras, I found it disturbing that no one took into consideration the conditions under which this exhibition was brought about. The uncertainty of payment hovered over everything.

As to Patras 2006, Alatsis replaced Mikroutsikos as artistic director when the latter resigned just when the decisive year started, namely early January 2006. As Alatsis puts it, there is this Greek illness to let things start very slowly and only in the end they accelerate to get things done. That happened in the case of the Olympics in 2004 or has been repeated in the case of Patras. Although the designation to become European Cultural Capital in 2006 was well known in advance, only after the Olympics were over did Patras receive some attention and then it was already too late. He added in the interview I made with him for Heritage Radio Network that this has historical reasons but it is too difficult to make any meaningful analysis; instead he recommends that it is better to say it is just like that and then to try to go forward. He advocates seeing the year of being the European Cultural Capital not as an end but as a start and hence views it as construction site where work – debate – on the future of Europe is being started. Certainly this viewpoint left a mark for the online magazine heritageradio prepared for this meeting in Patras and the exhibition about European Capitals of Culture was called appropriately “Europe under construction”.

My question with regards to such conception is whether we deal here with reality or not again with a kind of rationalization. If the case of the latter, it does not really allow any learning process as described by Thomas McCarthy in the case of Cork. There becoming a European Capital of Culture meant going through a tremendous journey of maturation from the first application brief to the full implementation of a program which had taken shape over many turns and stumbling moments to become a very complex, equally challenging concept to both Europe and the citizens of Cork. In the end the citizens felt they had altogether achieved something. The greatest benefit is as Mary McCarthy attests an increase in self confidence amongst the people of Cork as they are now more ready to take on greater tasks.

The concept of European Cultural Capital is complex because culture demands quite a different approach than the organization of festivals or carnivals. Again Artistic director Alatsis in his interview for Heritage Radio Network pointed out something relevant to this point. He said that to invite a famous dance choreographer, to show his work, that is easy, but to organize a debate around his dance concept with local artists, and in so doing to fill the European dimension with life, that is not easy. Yet it should be done for this is what being a Cultural Capital is all about: the start of debate with artists and others from other parts of Europe. Only then can local people who live and experience their daily lives within the boundaries of Patras begin to grasp the European vision and start to understand what it takes to make that become concrete in their daily lives.

Already at the ECCM symposium held in Athens 2005 you may recall the brief exchange I had with the mayor of Patras about the concept of ‘cultural governance’. This remark of mine came after Hassemer from Berlin said to the address of Patras that as European Cultural Capital it has responsibility not only to Patras or to Greece but to the whole of Europe. In other words, ‘cultural governance’ has to do with ‘assuming responsibility’ for what is happening to culture in Europe during that year. That responsibility needs to be passed on to the next Cultural Capital City. Therefore, it will be crucial to know what is entailed in this concept of ‘cultural governance’.

While working on the online exhibition parallel to the ECCM exhibition about “Twenty years of history of European Cultural Capital Cities”, many observations led to still further questions about past experiences I made in conjunction with European Capitals of Culture.

It started when I organized in Athens 1994 during the GreeK EU Presidency the Fifth Seminar for the Flemish government about “Cultural Actions for Europe”. The conference was sub-divided into ten workshops, including one evaluating under the chairmanship of Eric Antonis Cultural Capital Cities of Europe. Till to date his conclusion cannot be forgotten. Eric Antonis said next to the one year the most difficult thing to evaluate is culture itself.

When Thessaloniki was Cultural Capital, Spyros Mercouris and I organized a symposium about “experience and vision”. This meant looking more closely at the relationship between technology and culture while observing what went wrong in Thessaloniki. As one hotel owner said he wished they could do it all over again in order to avoid all the mistakes they made the first time around. Unfortunately there is no second chance and subsequently Greece has suffered in reputation due to two missed opportunities in first Thessaloniki and then now in Patras.

When Brussels was with eight other cities European Capital of Culture in 2000, I was working at that time as advisor for the European Greens to the Committee of Culture, Media, Sports, Youth and Education of the European Parliament. In knowing Bob Palmer and others of his team I got to know in particular the project Café 9. Eight of the nine cities attempted to realize a horizontal organization to promote dialogue about various projects each city was realizing e.g. “fear in the city” or “my favorite route home”. It showed the potential of new communication means to help establish a horizontal debate about what is going on not only in each city, but potentially throughout Europe.

Café 9 became for me the starting premise to develop the idea further on how an Internet Radio could facilitate the European Debate. This has become by now Heritage Radio Network, namely an Internet Radio with the Interreg III B CADSES project HERMES which aims to promote and to protect cultural heritage in Europe by use of new media. Needless to say this project is being done with the conceptual understanding that cultural heritage can be the common base for European identity.

Before going to Brussels to work in the European Parliament, I was asked by MEP Alecos Alavanos to be curator of a photo exhibition around a theme he designated as ‘OSMOSIS’. With Greek photographers looking out, while others look into Greek culture, this exhibition showed culture as seeking a balance between one’s own self-understanding and how others perceive that cultural understanding from outside. That exhibition was expanded once an invitation was received to show it in Weimar when European Capital of Culture. It included 16 photographers among them Izzet Keribar, Azade Koeker, Li Jiwei, Heinz J. Kuzdas, Hartmut Schulz, Astrid Kokka, Christina Vazou, Periklis Antoniou, Takis Anagnostopoulos, Lia Zanni, Mark Durden, Jeannine Govaers and Kees van Dongen. There were diverse artists straddling continents, cultures and cities. Their photos show that nothing is static; culture lives on even if as Li Jiwei states there is a risk that the human being disappears in a world of fake reality and becomes just a reproducible copy of desired images. That means altogether another, if not a global challenge to all diverse identities. It leaves to little space for European identity to be created out of the these many while still the past haunts Europe in the form of the empty bookshelves as created by Azade Koeker to indicate what has been left behind once Walter Benjamin did not make it into exile but committed instead suicide in order not to fall into the hands of the SS. It must be added the very important proposal by Adorno to consider having only identity insofar as one is able to deal openly and freely with one’s non-identity. In other words, all these non-identities should not to be reduced simply to be a cosmopolitan and therefore be denounced as did Hegel in his ‘Philosophy of Law’ as someone who does not subscribe unconditionally his allegiance to the state, but as someone who upholds that other dictum of Adorno, namely that the whole is not the truth! It means European Capitals of Culture should make available open spaces in which can be experienced this creative tension about identities. For only if they are open to be challenged by others then this ongoing cultural process of finding and rejecting possible identities can enrich European identity. And that is certainly not the case if European Capitals of Culture are reduced to be national representatives of a specific culture may it be the French, British or Greek.

So we have already a first definition of cultural governance: namely to keep each other’s identities open and willing to be challenged by other identities so as to keep European self-understanding free of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, dogmatism and assertiveness. We have these peculiar forms of hard definitions of cultural identities which can become violent in the belief to be threatened by other cultures as was the case in Ireland with regards to the British influence in the 1920s and we have the danger of larger cultures constantly trying to prove their superiority even if this means in reality just having one national identity linked to the nation state. Certainly France has here huge problems with its diverse cultural groups coming from countries like Algiers and which are not integrated at all as the recent street riots showed in especially the poor suburban districts. Here one can just wonder if the rejection of the EU Constitutional Treaty robbed these people of that extra European dimension for then it becomes a mere matter of being either French citizen or else remain forever not only a stranger in the sense of Albert Camus but as outsider unwanted by the society where these newcomers live.

Let it be said explicitly: had the Constitutional Treaty been ratified, there would be besides the French the European dimension to make possible mediation between someone having a different cultural background from French people and still able to live and work in France due to both sides discovering through the European space new identities. That reflects also what cultural governance should be about in Europe: a cultural mediation between the national traditions and this something added over and beyond any kind of national claim of identity and claim of well being. If done exclusively, then it is just another indication of failed European integration.

Of interest when reviewing some of the concepts implemented by past European Cultural Capital Cities, there stands out Antwerp with Eric Antonis who focused on not what was achieved in the past. Instead he perceived the task of a Cultural Capital City to bring out something new. The fact that twenty composers were asked to write new pieces of music of which 19 had their premieres during that year of being Cultural Capital, it underlines a creative type of cultural governance in need to be explained in reference to the philosopher Kant. He said philosophy is the art to draw out people by asking good questions and thereby let them become creative. This method involves several things aside from good questions. As my mother would say ‘the world needs artists, but artists need people who can listen!’ In other words, cultural governance is about creating the space for new expressions and audiences. It is therefore about strengthening the receptivity of the arts and of European cultures. If people are only interested in expressing themselves and not interested in what others have to over, there is no listening to each other and no dialogue can take place. Indeed they risk remaining locked in what are to be called ‘tautologies’. These cultural fix-points prevent them to open up to their non identities and therefore will not be able to participate in any European debate based on an appreciation of cultural diversity i.e. different identities existing throughout Europe and the world. In Brussels I could experience this one sided approach repeatedly at the European Parliament. When the Welsh delegation came, it was only about Wales; the same happened with the Spanish or Italian delegations. They would use the European stage to project themselves but in the audience there would be only Welsh, Spanish or Italian members who would live and work in Brussels. There was no European audience and so each member state remains relatively isolated in their respective cultural articulations. Hence it does matter if cultural governance is understood, as in the case of Antwerp ’93, to make “a conscious choice in favor of art and therefore in favor of nuances in meaning brought about by criticism to distinguish real from fictitious differences. Culture is depends upon asking questions, exploring doubts and looking for answers while opening up still further spaces to become creative in relation to the others.

I mentioned beforehand ‘cultural governance’ has something to do with responsibility for what happens to culture in Europe. Responsibility in the moral sense is something expressed by Solzhenitsyn who said about himself as writer that he feels responsible for everything which is happening in Russia, including human rights abuses. He meant every writer has to be like a ‘second government’ responsible for everything. If a writer, then all the more a European Capital of Culture if it is to lend credibility to that term in the title, namely ‘capital’.

The concept of responsibility relates to Adorno’s definition of art and culture, namely in seeking redemption while bestowing everything to the ‘imaginary witness’, we should not re-construct things but just tell them how it happened. Only then shall we be able to free out imagination and learn to anticipate things to come while reminding ourselves that to realize a European Capital of Culture is no easy task. In other words, we should retain some self critical measures in order to just in both our appraisal and criticism. This re-accounting and anticipation should not become a method to beautify everything but be based on very realistic and honest appraisals as to what was intended and why things failed to be realized as originally envisioned. That can and does happen since concepts and reality need to be mediated through learning to work out the contradictions while attaining consistency over time. That is cultural work at its best. Not to manipulate but to let reality speak and shape itself according to the needs of people for an authentic culture.

We know from novels which characters have an independent mind and which ones are but puppets of the writer and thereby express his political opinions and fulfill his determination of people and life. Yet culture is about the freedom of articulation and thus Adorno would say, by re-accounting things as it happened, this gives us a second chance to avoid in future making the same mistakes. Consequently culture is very much learning out of failures, including such massive failures as was the Holocaust and the perishing of millions of people throughout Europe.

It should be noted that such a concept has nothing to do with those ‘success stories’ as wished for by the media and business. Nothing compares even when thousand visitors attend an exhibition with the smile of a child once understood by the mother. Such understanding can be translated into art as giving something for the future to think about. It has become as a matter of fact a theme for dance choreographer Heike Henning in Leipzig who started a dance performance under the title “A smile goes through Europe”. Based on such a smile cultural governance will become definitely easier throughout Europe. For such a smile has to do with safeguarding the balance of life, including the upholding of a ‘friendly attitude towards the world’. It is something Cassirer said is the perquisite for any cultural creativity.

So ‘cultural governance’ means each European Cultural Capital City has to take responsibility for what is happening to culture and undertake everything so that Europe retains the ability to uphold such responsibility. To bring out the best, this means also giving recognition to such cultural activities that point into the future. Herbert Distel, creator of the ‘museum of drawers’, the smallest but prestigious museum of the world containing 500 art works of artists like Picasso, May Ray, Beuys, said Europe needs similar visions and expressions as Greek poets and thinkers managed in Ancient Greece and whose expressions stayed with us for the next two thousand years. Nothing less is demanded of every European Cultural Capital City, namely to contribute towards the making of such future visions which will be able to sustain our lives for the next 2000 years. If we succeed in that then European Cultural Capital Cities will make their contribution to Europe’s ability to face the challenges of the 21^st century.

 

Hatto Fischer

Athens 16.3.2006

hfischer@poieinkaiprattein.org

 

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