A Fair New Idea?! #2: How to pay collaborating practitioners living in countries with dissimilar average and/or minimum income?

A Fair New Idea?! call 2: Sustainability and international collaboration

A Fair New Idea?! is about far more than supporting one project towards further development. Below you find one of theSustainability and international collaboration, which were is developed further in the trajectory, but therefore not less valuable.

What aspect of working internationally interests you?

Repairing the differing revenue scales that international collaborators can access aside from the context of a given collaboration.

Description of the idea:

I’m setting up an experimental and collaborative artistic research project on queer collective approaches to Risk Reduction and the act of gathering. This research is structured around two horizontal and self-managed gatherings of queer artists and activists based in Brussels and its vicinity, and in Mediterranean Europe. Those European regions have strongly dissimilar average and/or minimum income. (The minimum income in Belgium amounts over 1,500 EUR; while in Greece, Portugal, and Spain it is of about 680, 740, and 1,000 EUR.) Aside from the context of their collaboration in this research project, the participants face very different revenue opportunities in their country of residence. In this project I want to search responses to the questions: How to pay collaborating practitioners living in countries with dissimilar average and/or minimum income? How can a project take into consideration and aim to repair the differing revenue scales that international collaborators can access aside from the context of a collaboration?

How might this impact international practice unfolding within or with Flanders and Brussels and beyond?

Many international collaborative projects are hosted in Flanders and Brussels every year and arts practitioners from European and non-European regions with dissimilar average and/or minimum income are invited to participate in those projects, promoting the internationalization of arts careers and practices. If these projects are promoting international arts communities that travel, collaborate, work, and live together in different configurations, it appears necessary to raise the questions: How can we build an international community when our access to revenue is strongly dissimilar? How can we mutually aid each other, not from a charitable or patronizing mindset, but from the desire to participate in horizontal conversations and exchanges? My proposal to foster conversations on the abovementioned matters has the potential to procure arts producers and practitioners in Flanders and Brussels and beyond with critical and politically engaged discourses on the current payment practices in international collaborative projects.

Contact details

@albertogarciadelcastillo