Is cultural representation a human right? How can communities reimagine and represent themselves?
Ed Carroll, Arts Programmer
I am an arts programmer and I’ve worked for a number of years in an arts centre in Dublin. Now I live in Lithuania where I still work on a number of art projects that are mainly community arts based. I guess my area of interest is art and public space and the distance between art, culture and society. I also work with a small art organisation in Ireland dealing with family and community centres which is called Blue Drum.
How did you get involved in 2Up 2Down?
I was invited by Jeanne and it was great to be able to meet her in situ in a project that she was really excited about. We were curious to see the work she was doing as I am interested in housing, regeneration, food and community work. There are lots of examples across the UK and Ireland of the dream of regeneration very quickly falling to the way side. The grand plan was that they come into the area, knockdown the houses, move the community out and they generate something new and a new dawn would emerge.
Invariably, however, the dream never matches the reality whether that’s due to an economic downturn or political issues. So what happens when you’ve only managed to achieve one tenth of the master plan that you hoped to achieve? So, I guess what’s interesting about this project is that it is a way of keeping communities resilient in the face of a cul de sac when it comes to narratives around regeneration. It also gives a physicality to an experience that very rarely find its way into the daylight. I mean after all the disappointment that the communities faced, how do they keep going in terms of their identity and their resilience?
What does living well mean to you?
I think that a reconnection between art, culture, society and politics is going to be so important to answering that question about living well. At the moment, the consensus we had fifty years ago that public funding should go to the arts has broken down. We need to anchor art in our society in way that say that it is valid and important and that funding should be given to make great art and culture if we want to make a great society. Also all the things that this project is concerned with looked at such as housing, food and community work are important elements that we need to be able to live with each other and to live a happy life.