Platform for Access to Culture

Like the other two platforms, the Platform Access to Culture was created in June 2008 by the Directorate General responsible for Education and Culture of the European Commission, that is within the overall framework of the European Agenda for Culture and the Structured Dialogue with the Cultural sector i.e. civil society.

The Platform Access to Culture organizes its work in three working groups:

Audience Participation
Creativity and Creation
Education and Learning

The Policy Guidelines: the Cultural sector's response

The Civil Society Platform for Access to Culture

positions Access to Culture in a human/cultural rights perspective;
places Access to Culture upstream in cultural policy-making (with a strong call to also mainstream culture in other policy fields);
formulates clear priority areas for action to develop the conditoins for creation, education and participation across Europe

Policy Recommendations by the Platform for Access to Culture can be found at:

http://ec.europa.eu/culture/our-policy-development/doc/PlatformAccessCulture_guideline_july_09.pdf

With these demands the Platform Access to Culture wants to involve the broader sector, but at the recent meeting of all three Platforms participants of the Platform for Intercultural Europe could not attend the meeting as if only a limited number could attend each respective platform meeting. Asked why there was no access to these meetings, Ilona Kisch, Coordinator of Culture Action Europe promised to improve coordination between the three platforms for the next time.

Pending a discussion with the other two platforms and more so with Civic Society throughout Europe, there needs to be repeated the question of Mitscherlich who asked if there is so much culture available, why do so few people make use thereof? Difficulties to gain access to culture may prove to be more a lack of experience and contacts with artists due to no understanding prevailing amongst those who have been educated in the direction of the hard sciences, engineering and analytical ways of thinking. Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolution" sees even a huge split between the scientific and the cultural orientation, the concept 'energy' having a very different meaning for someone in physics doing research for the nuclear industry compared to what is implied when a mother says it takes a lot of energy to bring up a child.

Since the year 2010 has been designated to fight poverty and social exclusion by the European Commission, it may well be that the failure to find access to culture (not entertainment per say) has to do with an overall poverty of experience linked to often points of entry being blocked as a club of the privileged and therefore too costly for those who can hardly cope in their everyday lives. Also the post-war history of Berlin from 1945 to the present, that is after reunification, shows that different socialisation and other value patterns leave people outside the cultural realms of the others even if they live in one and the same city. The cultural divide between East and West prevails despite many attempting to build bridges of understanding between both poles. Yet at the very core of people not finding access to culture is that they are locked out of themselves and cannot find the key which would open them up to another kind of participatory mode which would take them further in the understanding of how culture works everyday.

HF 18.6.2010

Board of the Access to Culture Platform:

AEOM/Jamtli

European Festivals Association

International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts IETM

HorsLesMurs/Circostrada Network

Culture Action Europe

Chair : Mercedes Giovinazzo, Interarts

Secretariat of the Access to Culture Platform is at:

The European House for Culture

Place Eugene Flagey 18, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Tel. 0032 9 241 8081