agency

The recent ‘Wake Up Exeter’ open letter postulated a ‘Grande Projet’ be built on a site on Paris Street, Exeter comprising a 1500  seat / 2500 standing venue , an art gallery, maker spaces and much more.  Sometimes by wrapping everything up into one big bang, the viability is compromised and the plan becomes too unwieldy, expensive and disruptive to the existing infrastructure.  Past experience suggests that there may be a more nuanced approach with a bundle of linked but discrete projects that can develop with different champions, funding streams, time lines; that we askew the grand in favour of the place responsive.

Do we need to be ‘an international city of culture’ ‘world beating’ ‘exemplary’ ’innovative’ or is ‘right for us’ a better metric?

Central to the aspirations of the open letters author and others in the City is the creation of a new multi form, mid to large capacity receiving and promoting house in the City centre.  This is implicit in the Cultural and City Centre strategies and is we understand being whispered about in the corridors of power.  We have been working with the Civic Society to explore the work done on this project to date and how a new vision for an innovative and inclusive performing arts centre might emerge from this and the new directions emerging in national arts policy.  The preliminary report emerging from this review is now available here.

click here to read the full report

The Cultural Strategy also suggests that one of the target outcomes of it’s key outcomes would be

  securing increased success with inward investment through strong joined-up advocacy and collaborative funding bids

It is far from clear how this collaboration will evolve so the Civic Society as an interested third party have resolved to help kick start the process by hosting a conversation amongst the diverse interested parties in late October at the Rougemont Room in the Central Library. This will be facilitated by Agency and we will be sending invitations to key cultural practitioners and place based organisation. If you don’t get one don’t worry just e mail me and we can sort it out.

by the ways in keeping with my crude Shakespearian reference the headings from Lear for those who are wondering