A new Encounter

This July sees the launch of Encounter, a programme of art in public spaces of North Kent, and the culmination of a long period of work for NKLAAP (North Kent Local Authority Arts Partnership) – a partnership incorporating Medway Council and the boroughs of Gravesham and Swale. Since I started working on Encounter as a freelance Creative Producer almost a year ago, it has been a turbulent year for the arts sector and for local authorities. Government spending cuts have not only squeezed everyone’s time and money, but also meant that all aspects of public spending are under tighter scrutiny.

Having freelanced across a number of local authorities in the past, the one thing I knew is that the resources, structure and capacity available to officers in different boroughs is never the same. Although partnership working means you can pool resources, expertise and experience, it also means you must deal with different kinds of organisational system, and different cultural strategies. In stark contrast to working with small arts organisations – where the challenges are often to do with finding resources and making contacts – local authorities have a very visible, public profile, along with transparent and accountable (and often, quite time consuming) processes.
Given the diversity of NKLAAP, I have been genuinely surprised at the openness and adventurousness of the partnership. In 2007 and 2008, NKLAAP produced Hei People by Reijo Kela: hundreds of colourfully dressed scarecrows that appeared overnight on farmland and in public spaces. The Hei People were very popular – in some cases local communities even repaired the scarecrows when they got damaged. But it was also quite a brave project for a local authority to do.
The difference between NKLAAP’s past projects and Encounter is partly to do with scale. Encounter comprises six commissions with community engagement at their heart, as well as a programme of talks, events and creative documentation. It is also the first NKLAAP project to engage specifically with an urban context. But the main challenge was always going to be to create a coherent and diverse programme that also satisfied the needs, ambitions and tastes of the people working across the partnership.
We issued an open call for Encounter, follwing a number of site visits which turned out to be surprisingly popular. (Who knew that 60 artists would want a tour of Gravesend on a rainy winter’s day?) This, and the fact that we kept the call-out deliberately wide, meant we received nearly 200 applications for the six commissions, each with a fund of £12k. The shortlisting process was necessarily thorough, and gruelling. The interview process was fascinating, but tiring. I’d be lying if I said that it was easy to reach a consensus between the five people on the interview panel (one officer from each of the boroughs, as well as an officer from Kent County Council, and me). But in the end, we came up with an ambitious programme that required everyone to introduce something new to their area – whether that was an interactive visual Encyclopeadia for a fictional character in Gravesend, a piece of site-specific Asian dance for Sheerness, or a mini dance festival in a vacant car showroom in Chatham.
It remains to be seen how well these different elements gel together over the next five months and, crucially, how audiences will respond. We’ve taken care to involve community participation in all the commissions, but at a time of severe spending cuts across the public sector, some members of the public feel, at least initially, that public money could be better spent elsewhere.
This is a key area in which working with a local authority partnership is a real strength, as well as a possible issue. On one hand, working with NKLAAP gives me, and by extension the artists, access to excellent local knowledge, community groups and decision makers who we can consult, and who can act as ambassadors to spread the word about Encounter. But on the other hand, being organised by a local authority (instead of, for instance, an independent arts organisation) means that Encounter has the responsibility of representing the council(s) as a whole.