How can artists deal with real struggles when building a sustainable career? What is needed, and what resources are available to them? What is needed to build a career as an artist? What support systems, services, and opportunities can artists access and benefit from?
Artists and creatives face unique challenges in building sustainable business models. However, through the right knowledge, design thinking, connections and collaboration they can.
As part of the TWIN HUB Project, organised by Creative Flip and the Goethe Institute, we focused on the educational gaps, struggles, support systems and sustainable career models which exist for artists in Zagreb and the Netherlands.
After their visit to Maastricht in April, BIZkoshnica Coworking hosted us for a week in Zagreb.
We visited their hubs, had a tour of the coworking spaces and visited the centre of Zagreb with a unique city tour by Upper Town Witch Tour Guides when we were. We were welcomed to Zivi Atelje DK, were we got to know the concept behind the ‘living atelier’, a space which continues to develop in relation to the people and artists who enter in dialogue with this space. We saw the beautiful old cinema turned into an architectural studio and bar, a building redeveloped by Studio 3LHD, and visited Maša Barišić’s atelier at Br.1, where she and others organise painting and ceramic workshops allowing them to sustain their creative practices.
We had the pleasure of being welcomed to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, visiting the current exhibitions: ‘Works of Heart’ of Sanja Iveković’s impressive body of work (on until the 1/11/2023), ‘The Visible Ones’ (on until the 1/10/2023), which also includes works by Maša Barišić, and their series ‘Collection as a Verb’.
Alongside this, during the final event of the Twin Hub Project, we gave a workshop about how to develop their career as an artist and gave a keynote presentation focused on the artist as a ‘digital nomad’ and how a nomadic lifestyle can be central in an artist’s career.
The exchange allowed us to discover a very different art scene, discovering the greatly State-managed art world which exists in Croatia, and the similar struggles and obstacles which art graduates face at the start of their careers.
TWIN HUBS: Exchange Programme
BIZkoshnica Coworking and The Artist and the Others are paired as part of the TWIN HUBS Exchange Programme, launched by Creative FLIP, aimed at engaging peers from creative hubs across Europe for the establishment of sustainable and long-term partnerships.
TWIN HUBS is a blended mobility peer-to-peer programme for hubs based on the “sister cities” model. It foresees a matching of two hubs who commit to a one-year long cooperation and exchange programme, involving blended mobility – with a combination of online meetings, community exchange, and a classic P2P exchange programme between hub members.
Find out more about this collaboration.
