GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

Productions, Real News and some academics such as Joyce Canaan and

Rebecca Hillman at Exeter who have been discussing for a number of years.

In December last year out of those discussions there was an event held in

Bedford called The Art of the Trade Unions and The Art of the Trade Unions

was a free event, but brought people and unions together in a very successful

way. The unions present included Equity, NUJ, Writers’ Guild, MU, PCS

Culture Sector, RMT, Ipswich Labour Trade Union Liaison, GMB, Unite, Aegis,

NUT and Artists’ Union and UCU, so across not just the GFTU but other unions

as well. The creative organisations there included Real News, Banner and

Townsend, three of the founding members, but also Platform Films, Culture

Matters, the Northern College, Bread and Roses, Marks Memorial Library,

Collective Encounters and the list goes on. It involved discussions, workshops

and a whole range of activities. It was a great day actually.

From that in the January there was a meeting of that organising group and it

was decided to go ahead with Liberating Arts which had been discussed for, as

I say, a couple of years. Liberating Arts is a not for profit hybrid event which

has characteristics of an arts festival, an academic conference and a

celebration of trade unions such as the Tolpuddle Festival and the Durham

Miners Gala and all of those elements come together, so it is both

performative, you can just come along and watch the acts, but it is also

discursive in that all of the sessions, we hope, will involve engagement

between the audience and the artists or between the academics about how to

help the trade union movement. The catchphrase is: How can we help liberate

the arts, but how can the arts help liberate us? That dialogue between the

trade union movement and creative activists and creative artists is at the heart

of what it is.

The venue is the Roborough Studios, a really good space. Exeter University

have come in with partners on the event. They are providing the Roborough

Studios, but also their Alexander Building, so we have got a lot of space that

we can use there and these are performance spaces, lighting, everything.

They are really good spaces and I think it is going to work very well there. We

have just about got the line-up finished in time for this and it ranges from Itch

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