Welcome by Mari Sanden and Florian Schneider on behalf of the PACESETTERS consortium
Thank you for joining us for the next five days. We would like to give you a warm welcome from this spectacular venue, La Termica. We are in the beautiful city of Málaga, in the wonderful region of Andalusia. On behalf of the PACESETTERS research and innovation action, we would like to express our sincerest gratitude to La Termica as the host of this SUMMIT. We would also like to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who joined us in person and rmotely to experiment with a new format: the Polyclinic of Creative Practice.
The summit's main aim is threefold
Firstly, we want to create a PACESETTERS community that is open, inclusive, interoperable, independent, fully committed and supportive. This community brings people together right now and, most importantly, helps them to find ways to move forward together, even beyond the scope of project funding.
Secondly, it is about developing strategic approaches to the most urgent issues of the climate transition. This summit takes place in the middle of the PACESETTERS project. Together, we will explore how to take the next steps, how to accelerate the pace of the transition and how to maintain a broad perspective.
Thirdly, we will explore how to build capacities, independent infrastructures and collective ownership, as well as investigating new models for sustaining them over the long term.
We find ourselves at a critical juncture.
The current wave of digitisation and automation has produced a crisis in which human creativity is systematically devalued, cultural heritage and creative works are inadequately attributed or exploited, and artists and audiences are excluded from advanced technological development processes.
AI technologies are not only re-colonising cultural heritage and threatening minoritised languages and endangered conceptual worlds. They are also rapidly redefining the traditional roles of artists and audiences, reducing both to technological objects.
Nevertheless, this enables us to appreciate and revalue what has been created and achieved so far, to question what it means to create something new, and to revisit, rethink and reimagine the relationship between heritage and creativity.
But how?
We are here to prototype an event format: A Polyclinic of Creative Practice comprising seven departments: Aesthetic Resilience; Collective Entrepreneurship; Creative Competitiveness; Impact Investment; Inverting Instrumentality; Rural Innovation; and Unlearning the Creative Self.
This format includes a variety of spaces and installations: Waiting rooms, intensive care units, stations and labs. Rather than focusing on hospitalisation and self-victimisation, however, the Polyclinic of Creative Practice is about clinicality as a quality that enables us to learn how to navigate the paradoxes of our time. This is a time when climate transition is fading from political agendas, and we are left wondering how and why to produce knowledge in a world that is on fire.
The Polyclinic of Creative Practice features a methodology combining artistic, practice-based research with Participatory Action Research to create an ecosystem approach.
Ultimately, our aim is to develop a new understanding of innovation and question what it means to create something new. As Joseph Kosuth said in the late 1960s: 'Being an artist today means questioning the very nature of art.'
What can you expect over the next three, four or five days?
Today, we start with a policy day, figuring out how to move beyond good intentions.
Tomorrow, we will continue with an Impact Day, asking: what constitutes meaningful work when the world is on fire? On Friday, we will hold a Research Day to analyse the challenges of practice-based research and research-based practice. The summit concludes with a rural entrepreneurship day and a field trip to the real world laboratory in Genalguacil.
We can already see that the Polyclinic of Creative Practice could become the model for the PACESETTERS Playbook. We will develop a pre-accelerator format tailored to the cultural and creative sectors. We will also employ a wide range of documentary practices in a variety of formats, from video and performance to games agnd collective note-taking.
Preparing this event has been a wonderful experience, showcasing the power of decentralised forms of collaboration within a model of shared responsibility and ownership between various stakeholders and actors. This event is being organised in close collaboration with the cultural centre La Termica, as well as with all our colleagues, friends and collaborators from Andalusia, Spain, Europe and beyond.