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SEAS Göteborg & Alingsås

13 - 22 August 2009

The Harbour Project in Gothenburg. Photo: Bernd Uhlig

The second stop of the North SEAS tour was Sweden’s main harbour city Gothenburg including a couple of days in Alingsås. SEAS main organiser Intercult took the role of local host. Thematically SEAS focused on two areas: in the larger city there were on-going debates about new urban developments and the role of citizens in deciding the shape of their environment. In Alingsås the question was one of participation in culture and developing new audiences for art.

The Places

SEAS Alingsås (13-14 August) and SEAS Gothenburg (16-22 August) were the major presentations of Black/North SEAS in Sweden, Intercult’s home country. Alingsås is a small town of about 22,000 inhabitants on the banks of Lake Mjörn. At half a million residents, Gothenburg is Sweden’s second largest city and the largest seaport of the Nordic Region. It is an established event city with reoccurring international arts and culture festivals, major concerts and large scale meetings arranged by both the private sector, free arts organisations and Göteborg City. The contrast between the two places could not be greater.

Main partners and setting

The second half of 2009 marked the six month Swedish Presidency of the EU. Intercult therefore strategically chose the date of SEAS Alingsås and Gothenburg to coincide with it and became part of the official Swedish EU presidency events programme. Both places are within the Västra Götalandsregionen in the South West of Sweden. It has a proactive cultural policy and there are changes underway in the Swedish state cultural system to devolve more responsibility to regional governments for cultural work and funding.

Intercult is based in Stockholm, so working in Gothenburg on large a scale project marked a big challenge for the organisation. Well-known for its international work in Europe and Sweden, Intercult was not so high-profile as an arts arranger Sweden itself. Intercult therefore decided to use the opportunity of SEAS in Gothenburg to extend its activities within its home country. In order to develop the project it appointed three local Gothenburg based staff members, Anders T Carlsson, Malin Schiller and Ethel Andersson, who took on the day to day development and delivery of the project and appointed a local technical director. (The Four Musketeers as they were dubbed.) The three coordinators were based within the social and cultural organisation Nätverkstan.

In Alingås, the major partner was the Town Council, the kommun, and most of the planning for the project was carried out in collaboration with the cultural department. This direct relationship meant that SEAS was able to ensure that the project was very prominent in the town, obtaining the permission to use the central Lilla Torget and Alingsås museum, vital in order to attract the new audiences.

Preparations, audience, volunteers, a debated work of art, funders and cultural relations

Venues and more partners

SEAS Göteborg & Alingsås in figures

Number of days: 2 days in Alingsås and 7 days in Gothenburg over a period of 10 days.

Number of events: 70. There were nine SEAS productions, plus workshops, a two-day CityScape conference and four CityScape Cafés, the SEAS Club (back in the programme for the first time since SEAS Mangalia),

Total audience: 9,600. The official figure for SEAS Alingsås (as recorded by Alingsås Kommun) was 1,093. For Gothenburg the figure was 8,500.

Adam Jeanes Facebook diary: 21 August: Subject: Time to catch up on SEAS Gothenburg…
” A little further on, there is the Suitcase standing in the square. Apparently it is attracting a steady flow of curious people. Some Chinese tourists drop in to look at the Bulgarian Communist memorabilia and talk to Vyara, who is looking after the exhibition, about their lives in China. They are critical.”