Creative Cape Town

Creative Cape Town’s Zayd Minty recently visited The Netherlands as an invited guest of The Prince Claus Fund (PCF) and SICA. PCF is a prestigious culture and development fund that promotes, enables exchanges and supports artistic and intellectual quality. SICA helps to assist Dutch cultural organizations in furthering their international activities through information and interchanges. Zayd tells us about his visit:

The Netherlands is one of the most progressive countries in terms of the support of the arts and culture. It has a highly developed cultural policy and each city has extensive support for artists, as does the national government. Amsterdam alone supports arts to the tune of Euro 80 Million annually. I went to visit various agencies engaged with design and creative industries. SICA put together a great programme that saw me meet a number of important organizations in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven. In the latter city I met the municipality to understand how best to approach our own bid for World Design Capital in 2014. Eindhoven was one of the two finalists (who sadly failed) for the 2012 bid which saw Helsinki winning. They generously shared their thoughts and ideas with me.

I also met people at the highly acclaimed Design Academy , one of the leading design schools in the world. Lastly I met people from Designhuis who are part of a network of designers who made an effort to raise the profile of Eindhoven as a design city by creating networks and events (like the Dutch Design Week) over a number of years – initially starting small, but now having won a number of substantial wins for the design sector in the city. In Rotterdam I met the Netherlands Architectural Institute (NAI) a body set up to promote Dutch architecture where I was fortunate to also see the latest Architectural Biennale. This year themed Open City and dealing with issues of interculturalism and tolerance and its impact on the built environment. I connected with the organization especially on an exhibition – the Architecture of Consequence – which deals with ways in which Dutch architects (and planners) engage with broad concerns of a sustainable planet. I also went to the Creative Factory based in a poor area, where an industrial building owned by the local government and in partnership with a young entrepreneurs is providing space for a number of creative agencies and leading to new innovations in the area.

In Amsterdam I met two people who worked at the municipality, one who is responsible for the Bureau Broedplaatsen programme (providing subsidized housing and work spaces for artists in collaboration with developers) and another who developed the city’s fairly new strategy around Creative Industries support. This new approach needs to work with the city’s very long support of arts and has a strong focus on stakeholder engagement. Lastly I visited a facility in Northern Amsterdam, a large warehouse transformed into a space for creative industry businesses. The model used here is “open-source urbanism” and builds on learnings from the Squatter Movement in Netherlands in a building owned by government and now run and managed co-operatively and experimentally. Each tenant builds its own 100sq metre office including services.

I was fortunate to attend the Prince Claus Fund awards and meet up with their network – probably the most dynamic and wide networks of the kind, that encompass cultural leaders from Africa, Asia, the Arab world, the Caribbean’s and the America’s. This years prestigious prizes, given to 10 cultural practitioners were awarded on the theme Culture and Nature – among the winners was South African photographer Santu Mofokeng. The main prestigious prize of Euro 100 000 was won by Colombian architect Simón Vélez

“Simón Vélez’s aesthetic and technical innovations in bamboo have enhanced its construction potential and challenged mainstream architectural trends. After completing his studies at Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Vélez moved away from the predominant international stream to focus on indigenous architectural practices. He invented a new method to build foundations and roofs, which transformed one of the world’s oldest building materials, namely bamboo, into a modern resource that meets the strictest international construction regulations and can even outperform steel. Simón Vélez is honoured for his aesthetic use of natural materials for contemporary design, for transforming local traditional indigenous knowledge through innovation that renews and extends its relevance as a source of solutions for global problems, and most importantly he is honoured for highlighting the essential rapport between sustainable design practices and social development, and between culture and nature.” Prince Claus Fund Website