Community Art Lab - Eugene van Erven

Pedro Manuel: We were talking about the differences between the organizations I selected for this project.

Eugene van Erven: You mentioned this organizations you visited so far and none of them strike me as being part of what we regard as community art, with the exception of Formaat, that is much more in the educational part of the spectrum. The Theatre of the Oppressed is an instrument, a pedagogy that uses theatre to train people to reflect on their own situation, while the community arts in the Netherlands have been strongly orientated towards good art, very oriented to make original, innovative art. It has been a long story. How it distinguishes itself from the practices of other places like U.K., which in Europe I think it's the most advanced, the most coherent tradition, that goes back to the sixties, or in countries like Belgium, where again all these things develop in their own socio-political way, cultural context. In Holland, we now look at the field as a spectrum that has a more radical edge to it and a more "close to main-stream" edge. I usually tend to distinguish between projects that are art driven, maybe contact driven, and concepts that are participant driven. The first I would call the "soft-core" and the other the "hard-core", in the community arts. People use the term "community arts" very loosely, particularly coming from a policy level. People think that you put an artist in the community, it is community art. Put an artist in a difficult neighbourhood and something beautiful will happen. It is a simplistic equation. It is not that simple. Even art in public space becomes community art then. One of the tasks that we set ourselves here in the Community Arts Lab is to make that thinking more sharper. Terms like "empowerment", "participation", "representation" are used very loosely, and they are complex. When a professional artist begins to collaborate in partnership with non-artists - who ever they may be, wherever they may be - very complex relationships develop. And we haven't really begun yet to systematically look at it, how that works, the ethical aspect of it, the aesthetical aspect of it. It is a very different way of working, than with professional actors that have a contract to be there on time, you a have a black box, all the circumstances are controlled. When you are working in an immigrant or working class neighbourhood, with people that never have been really involved in the arts, it is a whole new game. And literally the discipline becomes different because you, as a community artist, must respect the other or some ethical consequences start happening very quickly.


PM: A common word that people use in this interviews is "final product" and I think that is something that it comes from an artist point of view. And, from my own experience in Mozambique, I have been thinking on what can be most influential: a participative process or a final product?

EvE: I think that is more than a question of either-or. Some of the criteria that I have when I think in good community art, has to do with a number of things, including a good product. A good community art product must be able to communicate, to move, emote. Is must be skillfully made. But the thing is that, for instance a theatre play, it has to be made accordingly to the rules of the game, like to have a certain degree of participation. More than just me interviewing you and going away to write my story. There must be more involvement. There must be an element of ownership. You need to create art bearing in mind the cultural parameters where you are working, how can you capitalize them. Not only folklore but also the street language for example, or body language, or the very specific kind of humour, are all aesthetic elements that the community artist should bear, giving it back. When the product is presented to people that come from that area they are capable of decode those cultural parameters very quickly. Not necessarily the theatre critic, because he will see from other cultural parameter. But so it is necessary that it is good art, it is a "sine qua non". And that is important also for the artist involved, that wants to say I am still a legitimate artist. They are afraid that doing community art will reduce their status in the mainstream art world, there is that psychological effect, at least until community art gets a status of its own, like an artistic movement. And in some places that already started to happen, like in Australia, where they have moved further towards that mutual respect, and you see interesting crossovers between community art and avant-gard art. Community can be a cutting edge place to make art, if you are able to share the ownership of the piece. In this sense, a good product can only happen in a very solid, careful, rigourous process, in an artistic and ethical level. It has to be good because people have a kick out of it, it is also to work towards a moment of high, it is not different in community art, people want to be proud of what they have done. In community theatre, for example, there is a difference between UK and the Netherlands. Here, community theatre tends to end in productions that tour, with performances in different places. In the UK it tend to be one show, in the neighbourhood, and that's it. In the UK the emphasis tends to be more on the participatory and maybe less in producing a show to tour. I also think that it has to do with the artists that are involved in community arts in the Netherlands, that have been trained in arts academies. They were brought up to be artists, feeling that they must do work that legitimates their status as artists. In the UK they see themselves as facilitators, while here they consider themselves as artists. Anyway, the field in Holland is quite big, there is a lot of companies, projects and artists.


PM: Is Community Arts Lab mapping all the projects in "community art database"?

EvE: In the Community Art Lab we do different thing but the core thing we do is trying to keep track of the different projects that are running around the country, of course with the cooperation of the artists. We try to know the very basic things like where they are, how long are they running, if there is a theme, how many people involved, so that if you are in Rotterdam and want to know if there is anyone working in the same thing you are, you can contact, network. The other thing is that we pick a number of projects and try to follow them in depth, preferably since scratch to performance. One of the projects was Opera-Flat. Our basic attitude is participatory observation, but very often the boundaries are not so clear. Sometimes I get involved in brainstorming, or the artist ask me "what do you think of this". My main interest is the relation between the artist and the people, the participants. I try to keep track of that. On the decision making of the artistic process. In Opera-Flat there were various moments of interaction, with kids from high school or residents in a high-rise building, and I try to monitorise the way that interaction happens. We now brought on board a clinical psychologist interested in arts and she has developed a simple methodology to be able to measure some impact, without having big illusions about the scientific exactness. Because if you are involved in a community arts project I will not be able to determine scientifically whether you became a better human being. One of he challenges that comes from politics is that you claim this beautiful things about community art but you don't how to prove it. So that is other thing we do, trying to keep track of what other people are doing in this area, in terms of research, monitoring, evaluating, there is an expanding literature in that field.


PM: Why does it call Lab?

EvE: A Lab because we investigate a phenomenon, as from many different angles as possible and try to understand. There should also be experimentation. We research this things that occur outside the Lab, we bring them inside, but we also create a workshop to train artists in this field. You need skills to do this work that you don't learn in art school and through our documentation, evaluation work, through the past three, four years, we learned things that are valuable to share with young artists. So when they run against a dilemma that somehow for us is predictable then we can give them advice. Say to them "hey, this happened in this other project and they faced it this way and had this result". So, we are starting with a small group of artists from different disciplines. It is interesting to bring different points of view together. We create circumstances so that young artists feel free to explore. Our experience is that people that are very conceptually minded or too autonomous minded, very quickly run into problems.


PM: What do you think were the essential cultural policies in the Netherlands so that this community art could develop?

EvE: I think there were some key moments, happening through different governments. There was this minister called Rick van der Ploeg and he was the one who put the notion of "diversity of audiences" for artistic products on the map. That is to say, theatres were challenged to bring in more diverse audiences. It was a rather naive thing, because it was to judge people for the colour of their skin and not taking in consideration other elements like class, income, education level. There is already a class of third generation immigrants that found their way to the arts. But if you look at who frequents the arts is 15% of the population, people white, middle class, women, with higher education, and then a small portion that may come from a minority background. So, 85% hardly frequent the arts at all, and that is already a reason for the community arts to do something in places where there is no art. But you could not bring the existing offer, because it had nothing to offer, in terms of identification possibilities with that 85%. Anyway, that was Rick van der Ploeg, he started the ball rolling. There is also another advisory board, the Council for Culture. There was a member on that board that brought the concept of community art. This was around year 2000. That's when the policy started to change and funds started to become available. The interest increased with the subsequent governments, including the present one, that embraced the idea of culture and participation. So, it was a series of policies, with successive governments, around this idea that the arts can somehow positively affect the need and desire for social cohesion. No one had prove this scientifically but still the notion came to existence. There were some pioneering organizations that had roots in the seventies, coming from the radical political art movement of the sixties, a theatre company in Utrecht called Stut and and group Called Rotterdam Neighbourhood Group, I worked with both companies. They were always with difficulties with funding but with this development they suddenly are in a stronger position. Local governments are also very important players in this. Makes funding available to this projects that are local-based. The other funding aspect was that private foundations became important players, like Stichting Doen, in Amsterdam.


PM: The projects of community art, or art in the community, made me think on their impact in transforming a city, like when we speak about cultural cities that start with single artists projects in a neighbourhood and, with time, become places for cultural tourism. Do you think community arts can be ambiguous, dangerous, in this sense?

EvE: It is a big question you are asking. There is a project in Amsterdam that we followed, in a urban renewal area. Those are usually the places where this tension happens most and is most heavily fought out, because very often funding comes from project developers, housing corporations, people that own apartments and have the intention of renew their area because they want to attract higher incomes, they feel that there is more mix than it should for a "healthy" neighbourhood. Real estate prices will go up but people will also be forced to move from their houses, where will they go? An artist that gets involved in that, naively thinking "ok, here is some funding for doing something good" doesn't necessarily understand the kind of ethical dilemmas that he may end up in. One of the things we do is to monitorate those aspects, because I think that is one of the crucial ethical areas of community art. This is something I learned from a British colleague called James Thompson, who works in the University of Manchester. He became very painfully aware of the distinction of community art at a micro-level and at a macro-level. One thing is to think "I am going to this particular neighbourhood, I work there for a year, make an interesting piece of art with that people" and do everything accordingly to the rules. And it is a success on a micro-level. But on a macro-level things may happen in a way that you have no control. As an artist it is very important to be aware of this macro-level. He became very painfully aware of this, when he did a Boal-kind workshop in Sri Lanka, with children that were former Tamil soldiers, child soldiers, in a rehabilitation camp. A wonderful piece of theatre came out after a few weeks. He then he got back to England - and that's other thing, the nomadic aspect of artists moving in and out. Anyway, he came back and heard that a few weeks after he had left, the camp was attacked. Because this camp had become a sort of prestigious project for the national government say "look how good we are to this child solders", to get some international bonus from that. They put running water on this camp, electricity, good facilities which didn't existed in surrounding communities. The neighbours became very jealous: "why give this to those Tamils instead of us?". In addition, there were rumours that terrorists were hiding on this camp. So the camp was attacked, and they killed a number kids that James Thompson had worked with. He felt extremely guilty about that, and he started to analyse why that happened. He become aware that, as an artist, you need to be aware of the macro-level. Like here, you have to be aware of the local politics, the interests. And that's the things that an artist coming from the art school, full of ideals, doesn't see.


PM: It is usual to have projects of community art that promote the identity of a community but not communication with the city, the country. So the community feels more cohesion in a micro-level, but isolated in a macro-level.

EvE: But then the other question is: should community art work only with people that are isolated? There is the chance for community art to enter in what in England is called the "national conversation". Community arts should also open itself to those 15%.







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