About project | CultureFighter

Culturefighter

is a visualization tool of the independent film company partizanfilm and urban advocate NGO Východné pobrežie, which started out with a curiosity about the experience with large cultural initiatives and culture-led regenration programmes after Kosice became the European Capital of Culture 2013 – and our inability to find sufficiently concrete information on a wide-range of different experiences. We thus set out to explore ourselves and create such a database of experiences ourselves. Through a series of in-depth interviews, each focussing on a concrete case study, Culturefighter is seeking out and mapping the experiences with concrete cultural initiatives in a variety of places.

Culturefighter is building up a database of practical examples freely available to the public. It thus serves as an interactive textbook for anyone wanting to implement their ideas in the creative field. Culturefighter is driven by a curiosity about:

• the concrete effects cultural initiatives, cultural policies and the creative industries have had on concrete places in Europe
• the factors that influenced these impacts
• the positive and critical assessments of these impacts by practitioners
• the importance of culture in the lives of European cities and regions and their people
• the rationale for public and private investments in culture and creativity
• the impacts of cultural and culture-led regeneration projects

Culturefighter explores these issues through interviews with practitioners, activists, researchers, academics, and policy advisors, focussing on concrete examples of practices from a variety of environments.

Culturefighter serves as a knowledge base, methodology and insipration to several groups:

Cultural operators such as cultural centers, factories, incubators, initiatives, NGOs
• can learn from the pioneers and the best practice examples of setting up an organization or a festival
• can choose the best operational model for their new or existing structure
• can discover different ways of managing their own incomes
• can identify different possibilities of getting support for their activities
• can find a way to network on local, national and international level

Municipalities and local governments
• can compare their own cultural strategies with the best practice examlpes
• can use experience of creative industry development from other regions
• can find out how to set up structural support for cultural operators active in the area
• can learn from the case studies about regeneration of cities

Ministries of culture
• can study different grant and funding programs
• can invest into future cultural development to stay competitive among other countries
• can learn how to manage the culture agenda thanks to availability of information and advice from all around the continent

Universities
• can familiarse with present development of cultural and creative industries to promote their own sectors, study programs and faculties
• can find ways for successful cooperation with visionary entrepreneurs, private companies, municipalities, cultural operators

What is next?

In upcoming years we are planning to map more cultural centres, spaces and networks. We want to collect more case studies and best practise examples across Europe and beyond. There are also new topics on which we have to focus very carefully:

• creative economy and social design - as creative and cultural industries era is almost over, we want to record current situation and recent trends
• cultural cooperation of peripheral regions, to see how small cultural cooperations and exchanges of borders regions affect relations from geopolitical perspective
• follow-up visits - in many the situation dramatically changed after few years since we visited the place, we want to monitor progress or regress of concrete cases
• impacts of global events (e.g. Olympic Games, Expo, World Championship) and special programmes
(Documenta, Ars Electronica, Art Basel, UNESCO Cities, etc) events focused on cities and countries
• other sources of information such as lists of reccomended literature, media, websites and other platforms