Creative Coalition 2020 by Creative Industries Federation and Creative England
Earlier this week I watched the Creative Coalition 2020 Festival – a virtual three day event for the creative industries – from the comfort of my living room . It was free to attend and covered a huge array of topics across many sectors within the creative industries. A recurring theme throughout was around diversity, particularly ethnic diversity and social mobility.
One of the sessions was boldly titled Decolonising the Creative Industries. Despite the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, I never imagined seeing such a title for a panel session at an event like this…it’s a good thing. It enabled open, honest, valuable and much needed rhetoric about diversity AND social mobility within the industry in a way that was very refreshing.
The speakers were:
Both Zarina and Swarzy were so full of energy; succinct and incredibly articulate about their views, their experiences and what they hoped for the future.
Zarina pulled no punches, stating that she believed resources needed to be pumped into grass roots organisations that are affecting positive change within their communities and are stemmed in intersectionality in a way that bigger creative entities are not. When asked if she wanted to scale up The White Pube – a website she set up with Gabrielle de la Puente, which writes about art, video games and food and also has a following of almost 68,000 on Instagram – Zarina’s response was – and I’m paraphrasing here: “No. We want to remain independent. We want to pay it forward. I’ve got a day job that I need to get to at 2 o’clock.” The White Pube is currently funded by their supporters via Patreon.
Swarzy talked about her experience with reverse mentoring stating (again I’m paraphrasing): “It’s about reconciliation, to get my white colleagues on form, to make them feel empowered with using the right language at the right time for what needs to be said.”
I’d love to see them both in conversation with one another – I’m hoping that Zarina invites Swarzy on to The White Pube podcast.
Ammo Talwar stated that in order to deconstruct the establishment there were, what he described as, 4 pillars of racism that needed to be tackled: 1) institutional, 2) structural, 3) interpersonal and 4) unconscious. He also wanted to see detailed co-curated change with no time limits , i.e., do away with two year schemes and instil change for the long term, that looks at ‘the personal’ and ‘the systemic.’
Finally Babita talked about ensuring that every pound of her creative diversity budget was spent on breaking barriers to showcase unseen voices. The Channel 4 Indie Accelerator, in partnership with The TV Collective, was launched in July this year in a bid to work more with production companies set up by ethnically diverse creatives. Babita also made it clear that there was still a lot of work to be done to see more diverse senior leaders with editorial control across TV, making the point that there is yet to be a Controller appointed who is either of African or Caribbean heritage black or from any other ethnicity.
Some of the key sessions are available to watch here. The rest of the panel sessions, including this one, are available on demand to members of the Creative Industries Federation. I’m hoping they will make this particular session freely available, as I believe this conversation is one that would be of benefit for everyone in the industry.
