From May 13-18 Joanne Richardson traveled to Karosta Latvia to attend the NICE Residencies Meeting. To undertake this trip she received a travel grant from the European Cultural Foundation’s STEP BEYOND Mobility programme. Below is her personal report of the trip.

NICE (the Network Interface for Cultural Exchange) Residencies Meeting
Organized by: RIXC, Riga New Media Center, Riga, Latvia
& K@2 Culture & Information Center, Karosta, Latvia

1. Background

K@2 Culture & Information Center is an arts and culture NGO founded three years ago in Karosta, a former closed city and soviet army base which has been left devastated by migration, destruction of buildings and unemployment. K@2 designs programs and projects mainly for adolescents and young people in the Karosta region, teaching them photography, digital video & audio. Along with re-lab they are one of the founders in RIXC, Riga New Media Center and frequently collaborate with re-lab in Riga hosting meetings and events in both cities. Participants from several cultural & new media NGOs from throughout Europe were invited for a NICE networking meeting hosted at K@2 in Karosta. NICE - the Network Interface for Cultural Exchange - was established during the meeting of new media culture initiatives from the Baltic Sea & Nordic Region, which took place in November 1- 4, 1999, within the framework of TEMP - Temporary Media Lab project in Kiasma, Helsinki. The aim of the of the network is to create a common ground for new media culture initiatives in this region and previous activities have included festivals, exhibitions, establishing joint servers and points of common research. The meeting in Karosta in May 2003 was the first attempt of a primarily Nordic based network to include participants from Central and South Europe to discuss collaborative projects together in the future. More specifically, the meeting focused on establishing residency programs between the different regions.

2. Network Meeting

The informal part of the meeting began on May 13 with our 3 hour minibus ride from Riga to Karosta. The small size of the bus demanded that we became friends quickly. For some of us from the east-central region of Europe this was something of a reunion, I worked with Zeljko Blace from Multimedia Institute in Zagreb for almost a year and organized several large media festivals & conferences with him, I met Nikolett from C3 where I had an artist residence several years ago, and Slavo Krekovic is part of a.network (a network of media labs in south central Europe which Zeljko and I founded at the ASU2 meeting in Croatia in 2001) and also of mag.net, a network of electronic culture publishers of which I am also a member. After dinner in Karosta, and more informal discussions on the beach and over drinks back at the cultural center that evening, the formal meeting and working day began early in the morning on May 14. We made a short round of presentations of each organizations, our focus and interests, and ideas for residency exchanges, and decided to divided the larger group of 20+ into two smaller groups, one focused on discussing practical aspects of exchanges between the different NGOs especially in terms of content of programs and funding possibilities, and the other group had a meeting about mobility and migration issues, and came up with a concrete proposal for designing a mobile media production lab which would travel into regions that lacked infrastructure; the mobile labs would simultaneously be used for conducting research into the region and also to offer the possibility to local inhabitants for producing documentary self-representations. The two groups met later in the day to present the summary of their discussions to each other and to reach some final resolutions about where we would go after the meeting.

I participated in the first group which discussed the practical aspects of residencies such as the purpose and program of the exchange and sources of funding. After an initial discussion we decided to split the group further – a decision motivated by several differences. EMARE and NIFCA are well established (and well funded) artist residency programs to which artists apply and are selected by a committee. Many of us from media centers/labs in post-socialist countries decided fairly early in the discussion that we are not interested in inviting artists to apply at random and committees which make selections. In this context we thought it would be better to abandon the label of “artist residency” for the kind of activity we had in mind, which was more along the lines of transfers of peoples, technical knowledge and resources between the different institutions. Several of us gave reasons why we don’t like the classic model of the artist in residency which comes for a month to work on her own project and usually make some installation or exhibition before leaving - and in the best case scenarios the real point of an exchange of information skills etc is to have the ‘guest’ and ‘hosts’ work closely together on a project which is interesting and beneficial to both. I gave as an example one of the digital video residencies we hosted in Cluj – a feminist filmmaker from Zagreb came to work with our video group on the pilot series of experimental documentary shorts for the local TV in Cluj and simultaneously our group worked with her on a film she made for Croatian television about politics, culture & society in Cluj. The other point of divergence in the group is that while western European residency programs like EMARE and NIFCA are funded by state institutions, those of us running media centers in Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Latvia are relying mostly on funding from external sources and apply regularly to Langlois or European Commission or ECF or Goethe for project funding – and since the differences in our funding structures are significant, it was difficult to have a common discussion. So the group split again and the “eastern” groups (sorry, this is not geographically accurate) had a separate discussion about developing a long term media education project (in which exchange of knowledge and persons are part of this development rather than residencies in a more classical model) and there were several proposals for applying together as a network for funding. We also had several suggestions that before jumping the gun and launching into a funding application we should know more clearly what we are working towards together & have some smaller scale exchanges, so we decided as a final resolution to first start exchanges between our own institutions & start sending our members to each other. After the very short meeting in Karosta, we were all invited to observe the Art & Communication festival on May 16 and 17 organized by RIXC, and many of the discussions started in Karosta continued informally in Riga during lunches and dinners between the festival events.

3. Outcomes & Future Developments

Since a lot of the follow up discussions in Riga happened in between two or three participants I am not sure how the contacts for each of the participants will be developed in the future and can only speak about concrete decisions I was involved in.
(1) After discussing some of our video projects in Romania with K@2 in Karosta (which was started by a filmmakers group Locomotive), Kristine and Carl from K@2 decided to invite Diana Balog from our video group in Cluj to discuss working on a collaborative video about borders. We are now finalizing details, and it is probable that Diana will apply for a travel grant to visit them in Karosta in August or September.
(2) Multimedia Institute in Zagreb already has a tech residency program, and after some discussions Zeljko and I agreed to send our hardware specialist from Cluj for a month to Zagreb. I have asked them to send a programmer in return as we need someone to do some perl and php workshops in Cluj.
(3) Although details remain to be finalized, it looks like I will be going to Helsinki in October for one of the NIFCA research residencies and simultaneously to collaborate on organizing a segment of the RAM workshop in November.

4. Significance of Mobility Grant

Although I knew many of the participants in the networking meeting, I met a lot of new faces, and the structure of working together closely and intensely for several days to come up with concrete proposals for exchanges and collaborations was extremely useful. I am already very excited about the projects and invitations that are already underway for the next few months. To be honest if I did not get the ECF Step Beyond grant I would not have been able to attend the meeting. I remember a couple of years ago when after receiving an APEX grant I heard they would be discontinued – the reasons I received when I asked about it was that the east/west separation was no longer relevant and in this context APEX no longer made sense. I disagreed then and I still do now. If there is no longer an east/west divide (to my mind there is no real divide between places like Slovenia and Austria where the average salaries and standard of living are pretty similar) there is still very much an economic divide across Europe (between 800 euro a month salary in Slovenia and less than 100 in Romania or Moldova). On a European level, I think it is important to recognize the reality of economic borders that continue to contribute to an isolation of ideas and experiences for many people who can’t participate in a paneuropean dialogue because they cannot afford to spend 4 or 5 months salary on one week of travel. I’m very glad and grateful that a funding structure for mobility exists which can enable people – especially those who are at an economic disadvantage - to travel and be able to exchange ideas, values and experiences.