Tussenruimte: Concrete Blossom
Community of Sauce-rers
Meet a community of wizards and sorcerer's apprentices. On the initiative of Concrete Blossom, a new community of cultural workers is shaping the design of future urban culture and the neighbourhoods that produce the Sauce. They guard, maintain and constantly revise the magical ingredients of the Sauce - a Community of Saucerers!
Urban Researchers
Concrete Blossom has invited a number of more experienced practitioners from various disciplines to join the Community of Saucerers as urban researchers. The urban researchers each contribute their own expertise, knowledge and experience to a joint reflection on a community that maintains, nurtures and propagates the Culture and its Sauce. In conversation with the next generation of makers, thinkers and organisers, they formulate the content of a series of workshops in which they work closely together.
The urban researchers are active as architects, designers, musicians, programmers, DJs, visual artists, photographers or social workers. What connects them is a distinctive approach in which they combine research and practice.
Based on principles such as train-the-trainer and 'each one teach one', they offer the young people involved insights and skills that they in turn can pass on to interested city and peers.
Yout Dem
With Yout Dem within the Community of Saucerers, Concrete Blossom offers young people the opportunity to develop themselves. In a safe environment and in close collaboration with more experienced colleagues and peers, they can make the most of their potential.
As artists, designers and all-round culture makers who have both feet in the 'neighbourhood', Yout Dem members approach ecological, social and metropolitan themes from the distinctly non-institutional perspectives. Their practice can be seen as an expression of a (demographic) tipping point. Formerly peripheral phenomena, objects, individuals and (sub)cultures are now leading the way in what is happening in the mainstream of fashion, music, visual and popular culture.
Moreover, by redistributing subsidy money through a youth programme, Concrete Blossom puts the existing infrastructure of art subsidies and government money flows into the service of grassroots cultural initiatives. Although these young makers who organise themselves outside the established cultural sector have become socio-culturally indispensable, it is still difficult for many of them to qualify for (financial and production) support.
Where 'talent development' in the cultural sector is still too often mainly at the service of the institution that organises a trajectory, the YoutDem programme takes place explicitly in the intervening space. It is an approach that deliberately blurs the distinction between established and emerging talent, formal and informal parties and between professionals and amateurs.
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