Funding cuts and Moving Beyond State Dependency 
Last year we saw many art and cultural institutions get defunded by municipal and national funding bodies in the Netherlands. This has a trickle effect on art workers in the Netherlands and on what kind of institutional, artistic and curatorial practices are supported. The defunding of institutions has instigated a barrage of questions that we (institutions and artists) have been asking ourselves together with many colleagues around the world. How can we read the current defunding of institutions? How do political ideologies, particularly neoliberal tendencies, shape the allocation and design of art subsidies? To what extent do liberal market principles influence public funding bodies? Does the pressure of neoliberal frameworks, commodify art and undermine its potential for genuine political dissent? How can art institutions and artists remain resilient and address structural precarity in the long term? How do we navigate our reliance on state funding under the current political order? How do we maintain our political How can we collectivise and share resources in light of a funding infrastructure that creates competition?

Program:
11.00h - 13.00h: Jack Segbars and respondents
13.00h - 14.00h: Lunch
14.00h - 16.00h: Pascal Gielen and respondents
16.00h - 17.30h: Koen Bartijn and Sepp Eckenhaussen (via zoom in Breda) and respondents
17.30h -18.30h: Wrapping up - questions, thoughts

Pascal Gielen (1970) is a writer and a full professor of Sociology of Culture and Politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA) at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he also leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). He serves as the editor-in-chief of the international book series Antennae – Arts in Society (published by Valiz). In 2016, he was awarded the prestigious Odysseus Grant for outstanding international scientific research by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). In 2022, he was appointed curator of the Culture Talks conference by the Flemish Government. Gielen has authored numerous books, translated into Chinese, English, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. His research interests include creative labor, the commons, and urban and cultural politics. Gielen is a regular contributor to Belgian newspapers De Morgen and De Standaard. 
www.ccqo.eu // www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/aria/

Sepp Eckenhaussen (1993, he/him) is an arts researcher and organizer. His work focuses on visual art, digital culture, activism, policy, and new economies. He works at the Institute of Network Cultures and CARADT, where he runs the research program Creative Reset and hosts the podcast Art in Permacrisis. From 2020 until 2023, Sepp was a co-director of Platform Beeldende Kunst, an activist think-tank that represents the interest of independent art workers and takes action for better art policy in the Netherlands.

Koen Bartijn is currently the artistic director of the art initiative VHDG in Leeuwarden. From 2020 to 2023, he was part of the core team of Platform BK, an association by and for cultural workers in the visual arts. He is also a board member of the Creative Coalition. In this role, Koen conducts research on Fair Practice policy and actively contributes to its further development. He does this by writing about Fair Practice, developing programs and bottom-up policies, and representing cultural workers to policymakers and politicians. His work is not limited to Fair Practice alone, but also explores broader forms of solidarity and collective strategies aimed at improving the working conditions and social position of cultural workers in the Netherlands.

Jack Segbars is an artist, researcher and writer, based in Rotterdam. He is engaged with the conditions, parameters of the artistic infrastructure, that define the politics and materiality of artistic production. The interconnections between the different positions: critic, writer and visual artist are mobilized as artistic investigation. In 2009 he produced the publication All Around the Periphery (Onomatopee) that deals with the overlap of positions and domains. In 2012 this was followed by Inertia (Onomatopee) a travelogue of visits to Palestine that deals with artistic engagement. Segbars regularly writes articles on art and art-related subjects including Metropolis M., Witte Raaf, Parse and Open! He is one of the founders of Platform Visual Arts (Netherlands), a platform researching the role of art in times of political change and austerity. In 2021 he completed his doctoral research at the PhDArts program of Leiden University, the Netherlands.


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