The Cure for Curators
Throughout the pandemic I have been in discussions exploring what we are experiencing and how our professional network of artists and cultural operators is navigating the corona rollercoaster. I’m fortunate to be the vice president of the Europe Jazz Network (EJN) – an association of over 170 members from 34 nations dedicated to the development and presentation of creative jazz and improvised music – which has maintained close contact since our lives were disrupted in March 2020. Martyna van Nieuwland is a colleague from the Europe Jazz Network. She is a curator, commissioner, researcher, and writer based in Poland and is the head of programming of the Institution of Culture Katowice City of Gardens, where she programmes the Katowice JazzArt Festival and the world music festival, Gardens of Sounds. She writes for publications dedicated to interdisciplinary art and specialises in curating interdisciplinary and social projects within the programme of Katowice - UNESCO Creative City of Music, such as the Polish programme of the Czech Music Crossroads in Ostrava. A member of the team that organised WOMEX 2017 in Katowice, she has been a board member of the EJN and was a member of the programming committee for the 2019 European Jazz Conference that took place in Novara (Italy). Martyna’s life changed dramatically during the pandemic: here are her reflections on this extraordinary time.
The Cure for Curators
Other Complications
Doctors dealing with illness are concerned about underlying conditions or accompanying diseases. In a cultural environment, it is the same. Nepotism, indolence, bureaucracy, lack of knowledge or intuition, all have effects similar to a lack of vitamin D. There’s more. The ‘diseases of affluence’ include burnout, depression, harassment, to name a few. Sounds familiar? We have our chronic ailments caused by politics, finances and incompetence, which can lead to further complications, such as replacing the term ‘culture’ with the term ‘entertainment’, just one of the long list of ‘health problems’ related to culture. The last year and a half – the timeframe of the pandemic - has added yet more issues. A popular illness called ‘postponia’ has made its presence felt in the contemporary lexicon, as has ‘chronic cancellation’.
The first remedies against COVID-19 appeared too late, and are systematically surpassed by the new mutations: alpha, delta, gamma, etc. Vaccinations seem to have temporary effect and future prevention raises a lot of questions. In the meantime, in every corner of the world, research continues on COVID-19 medications. For us, people working in cultural sector, similar problems have arisen, and questions about a special cure for culture remain valid and some are clearly controversial.
From the very first days of the pandemic, we all knew that any loss would be painful and some sectors, such as HoReCa (also HORECA, the Dutch, German, Italian, Romanian and French languages term for the food service and hotel industries), would be affected worse than others. Culture, however, is more complex than the events industry and it is here that another disease is symptomatic, at least in Poland, so called ‘festivalosis’ which recalls ‘Lyme borreliosis’ a fast-spreading infection, with long-lasting effects.
Throughout the last 18 months, we have talked frequently about the situation for musicians, visual artists, actors, and venues that have no public financing. While it has been discussed in detail, the outcomes have not been sufficiently effective in convincing governments to introduce systematic, sustainable solutions for supporting cultural employees. Instead, we noticed another underlying condition or accompanying disease – the infamous ‘grantosis’ - which exploded with exceptional force during the pandemic. In Poland, distribution of financial support through grants and stipends was accompanied by surging controversy. The rich got richer during the crisis and individual artists, especially those representing niche genres like folk or improvised music, received minimal, or zero support. Unlike the Europe Jazz Network, which took immediate action and demonstrated amazing resilience on a European level, in Poland we have no common advocates who could speak on behalf of the music industry. Once again, we saw the familiar situation that much depends on particular people and/or individual decisions, sometimes made by one person. Solidarity seems to work best in Poland against something or someone (and therefore remain short-sighted, collapsing after the goal is reached), but do not necessarily work as effectively for something, such as a positive step towards building a broader perspective.
In this moment - of action, pro-action, and re-action – the role of a curator is as crucial as it is significant. Professional curators, unlike designated institutional coordinators or directors, are more likely to work regardless of any political (or virological) circumstances, and to function independently from current states of mind. In a crisis though, there’s often another obstacle to tackle, sometimes harder than finances and politics – sometimes it is a curator’s own ego that prevents collaboration, the action most needed in times of danger.
Why curators? For the obvious reasons of being in-between, mediating and moving among artists, institutions, and the audience. They have (or should have) enough experience in production, but at the same time feel an urge to educate themselves constantly, to develop and gain new skills. Curators have a social role which each of them exercises in individual ways. The pandemic has impacted the role of a curator and has led me to re-evaluate it. This matter is interesting to me for a few reasons, most notably because interdisciplinary curatorial actions are the focus of my daily work: they were my main concern during the months when international collaborations were limited and remain so today. Fortunately, I was able to find some simple solutions to my pandemic dilemmas…
Collective Improvisation
My first thought was that communication is everything. Once we noticed that we were behaving like headless chickens with no clue of what was going on in our unprepared countries facing a gigantic question mark, the European jazz community organised itself quickly. The support within the Europe Jazz Network is hard to overestimate. We have proved to be specialists of improvisation in every sense, and are even more fully aware how well prepared one needs to be to improvise freely. Global museums, art galleries, venues, social initiatives and, especially in Poland - theatres - managed to switch to online streaming relatively quickly. However, the jazz community in Europe raised the bar when it came to a real sense of solidarity and saw interaction as the primary means to survive and overcome the crisis. In the end, zooming and other forms of online activity became second nature for the members of Europe Jazz Network whose staff led the way, becoming technological superheroes.
My first example of jumping into the virtual world during the pandemic, trying to save our creative spirit, was chats with artists and curators to figure out something new, something that was inspired by these unprecedented circumstances. Polish pianist and composer Joanna Duda and Dutch French horn virtuoso Morris Kliphuis, who met during the first edition of the amazing Sound Out (an artist development platform founded by Arts & Parts), were on my radar as two brilliant minds and spirits. In 2020 Joanna and Morris became artists-in-residence at JazzArt. Morris had visited Katowice a few times with different projects and Joanna was supposed to perform three different shows in 2020. In the end, her online solo concert was our only original production in April last year. Nevertheless, we didn’t give up: this extraordinary duo kept in touch, and one year later we managed to meet live in June in Katowice for a week of rehearsals, which concluded with the first performance of their duo, Wake the Dead. Six weeks later they met in Berlin, where they continued to explore the central premise of mixing the sounds of early instruments with electronics to create new paths for this music, which is so rich in tradition. Interestingly, the project had another interdisciplinary aspect across early phases of the collaboration: visuals. The photographer Erik van Nieuwland spent time with Wake the Dead, following them, while being their eyes and sometimes - ears, while also motivating them, finding fascinating locations for the photo sessions, interviews, and video recordings. Wake the Dead will reach its third phase in November 2021 in The Hague and has been one of my pandemic highlights. It demonstrates the power of human communication and persistence, transcending the limitations of time, space, and genre. Mixing artforms in the pandemic became another challenge which I will explain a bit more below.
The second step was to revise our old ways of acting and thinking. When timeframes and spatial conditions don’t fit into new conditions, we must find new solutions. Initially many of us, including me, were carried away by the chaos of the crisis, and felt empty or lacking in motivation. This takes us back to point number one, ‘communication’, because paradoxically, the pandemic gave us a chance to talk to the people who we didn’t have time to call in ‘normal life’ because we were too busy. Some used this extra time in a very effective way, to confront their doubts and to discuss them with new people, or with someone that they had not known for long. Such discussions could be game changers and proved that the last 18 months has provided the circumstances for artists and curators to leave their comfort zones and to act ‘out of the box’. My new pandemic mantras included ‘think slow, move fast’ and sometimes ‘think fast, move slow’, especially when brainstorming how to reach the audience when the audience cannot come to us. Not only did positive patterns appear, but, sadly, I also noticed many opposite examples, as when the pandemic was used as a tool to exclude competition and monopolise the market. In this sense, the pandemic could work as a simplified (but radical) creativity-meter, dividing curators into two groups: those who are flexible, who sought out avenues for communication and desperately tried to find new ways to operate, and those who are less flexible, more dependent on their own habits, who gave up searching and just waited for the whole situation to be over, so that they could continue the same old song.
The third aspect that the pandemic has brought into focus is the organisation of individual work and self-discipline. This appeared to be well maintained by freelancers but was, or is, somewhat hard to achieve in public institutions with clear (or blurry) hierarchy, and a strict (or chaotic) division of tasks. Parallel with the levels of pandemic creativity from zero to extreme, the sense of duty could be observed in the same range - from a passiveness and/or total refusal of any activity, to non-stop workaholism, with no ability to distinguish time between work and leisure while being stuck at home 24/7. Managers and other employees of leading organisations tried to be available for anyone, while depending on the uneasy schedules of their colleagues who had to deal with isolation or being locked at home with their school aged children and remotely working partners. In online mode, the borders between night and day, weekend and weekdays, holidays and working days became very unclear, and quickly turned out to be very unhealthy.
For anyone working within a cultural institution, the last 18 months has been time of intense work and was a dynamic, ongoing test. Headless chickens and insurmountable hurdles are my overriding memories, as I saw many working without a clear strategy or perspective, with never enough time to think profoundly about how we work, and for whom. We have gone through a period of intense questioning regarding the ways of managing our initiatives and institutions, about our involvement in cultural politics, and about culture’s dependency on political structures. At the same time, we have examined asked questions about the needs of individuals and the role of individuals who programme the content that is presented in the institutions. The pandemic revised the power of teamwork, sometimes in brutal and exclusive ways that reminded me of ‘natural selection’, while the crisis exposed the weaknesses and the instability of many institutions. Relativism, hypocrisy, opportunism - these consequences are older and more painful than any pandemic. In some European countries where the political situations have become unbearable, they became a plague of their own in the cultural sphere.
Martyna van Nieuwland, October 2021