ACMC Webinar Series: Resilient Voices
The chosen theme for the 2025 international Arts and Cultural Management Conference (ACMC) is “Crisis and Resilience”. This year’s edition aims to explore the role and hurdles of cultural initiatives in nowadays society and how the progressive shift of the Venn diagram linking culture to politics towards superposition is due to the specific features of the sector’s resilience. The globalised and fast paced contemporary society is facing unprecedented challenges and extreme fragmentation hindering the sense of community which is often at the core of “making culture”. The ACMC is aiming at (i) dissecting the distinctive features of the ongoing cultural crisis; (ii) comparing the different ways to approach cultural activism; (iii) and discussing possible solutions making use also of technological developments that somewhat contribute to the observed cultural alienation. To feed the live discussion due this fall, the ACMC Committee is setting up a series of webinars and giving the floor to cultural activists.
The first webinar was conceptualised in partnership with the European Network of Cultural Centres (ENCC) and envisages a discussion with and among managers of cultural centres within and beyond Europeans borders. We want to understand what role they envisage for culture nowadays, what new challenges they face in their community building activities, if cultural activism has become more political, and whether the nature of on the ground cultural activism has changed for good or is just adapting to unprecedented challenges.
Joining this poignant discussion will be Piotr Michalowski, board member of the European Network of Cultural Centres (ENCC), along with ENCC collaborators: Heather O’Donnell (The Green Room, Cologne), Ana Riaboshenko (Culture for Democracy, Georgia), and An Pauwels (De Grote Post, Belgium).
