FULLY BOOKED
Convened by Annie Fletcher, with Club Solo (Thomas Bakker & Iris Bouwmester) and Sharelly Emanuelson
Contemporary art is a field of practice heavily attached to the Metropole, with arts workers often relocating to urban centres in order to pursue their careers and associated lifestyles. But what does this indicate at a time when metropolitan centres have been shown to be electorally disconnected from the regions surrounding them? In the Netherlands, in particular, there have been calls to decentralise arts decision-making from the ‘Randstat’ to the regions—but the precise political and cultural pathways for this are yet to be seen. Is there a need for critical regionalisation? What could it offer, and what could its pitfalls be? What role could public institutions and public funding play, in contexts where this is available? And what might this mean beyond the ‘public sphere’ of individual nation-states, is there a trans-regional potential?