Funding of Meet Factory

I would like to talk now little bit about the ties of Meet Factory with the city council. As we said before we are very grateful for their support. And we as Meet Factory are one of pretty few centers that have such support. We have the 4-year funding from the City of Prague, which have only a handful of other institutions have. And we are really the alternative and the underground part of that.

Of course there are some big institutions like National Theater and National Gallery, etc. which are financed directly from the Ministry of Culture and additionally from the City of Prague. But as for the City of Prague we are really one of the maybe 10 institutions. The other are Archa Theater, Roxy, NoD or Rock Café which are other music art venues that have similar support to us. And therefore they take us as a partner and they really talk to us on a pretty different level then when I was doing the Sperm Festival before. And the festival was done by a small NGO, which was basically me and a couple of friends. And the city did not take us really seriously although they gave us support anyway, some financial support.

And we can see that the city sees us as a partner in that they prolong the rent here for another 10 years. So the original rent contract was about to finish in October 2015 and now we have the contract until 2025. So they are at least counting on us until then to do culture here. And we do have around 16000 visitors per year at the moment, which we hope will rise a bit. Overall it is not much for Prague. In Prague there is really a lot of tourists. But for the really progressive and new stuff that we do it is not negligible, I think. And Zuzana can maybe talk about the relationship with the public.

Maybe I would just add one thing. Because of course as Michal said, we are very grateful for the approach of the City of Prague. But on the other hand this year has been also very nice or successful in terms of negotiations with the Ministry of Culture. Although they only gave us maybe 8% of our budget, we still got quite nice financing for the gallery and also they are taking us seriously as one of the players that are in the game. And the same thing is with cultural institutions or cultural institutes of different countries that we previously talked about such as Goethe Institute, such as Polish Institute. Whenever we approach them they are mainly thrilled and they see us as a lucrative potential partner and they are very nice in discussions 90% of time. So that is also nice.

CultureFighter

Michal Brenner & Zuzana Jakalova

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