Another pandemic year for the cultural sector

TIFF got it's 20th anniversary this year

TALKING NUMBERS

In 2019, there were 7.9 million cultural sector employees in the EU (3.7 percent of total employees), according to Eurostat data. In Romania, the cultural sector had 1.6 percent of the country’s total number of employees and generated between 1.5-3 percent of GDP, according to industry analysts.

In Romania, the cultural sector was one of the hardest hit in the first months of the pandemic, according to data published one year into the health crisis by UBB economists, cited by Economedia. During the first pandemic wave, most sectors were affected, with the hospitality and tourism sector falling by 67.4 percent, while the culture, arts, and other services sectors saw record declines in the second quarter of 2020 (-67.4 percent and -60.4 percent, respectively).

FESTIVE VIBES

Even in this difficult context, Romania found a way to bring joy and happiness to festivalgoers by allowing events like Transylvania International Film Festival, Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Electric Castle, Anonimul International Film Festival, JazzTM, Jazz in the Park, Untold, Summerwell, and the new SAGA Festival to take place, attracting both criticism and praise from the public. The pandemic struck again at the end of September this year and brought on new restrictive measures, which had a small impact on the George Enescu International Festival and led to the cancellation of Sound of Bucharest, an event that would have featured Armin van Buuren. So far, events in public places have not been allowed to resume, while indoor events are only permitted at 30 percent of venue capacity.

COOPERATION IN THE CULTURAL SECTOR

In March, Raw Music launched MEWEM, the first mentoring programme for women in the Romanian music industry. For three months, 10 women who were industry leaders – artists or record label managers, festival promoters, communication specialists, and independent artists – guided 10 other women who were in the early stages of their music industry careers.

May brought the launch of the Work Upside Down initiative, as part of the Cluj Future of Work project, financed by the European Regional Development Fund through Urban Innovative Actions. It aims to generate public conversations that will be accessible to a wide audience and mediated through artistic experiences, all related to the future of work. Culturepreneurs’ plans had been imagined long before the pandemic began; their visions had been built on research and observations, discussions, past projects carried out alongside various stakeholders in the cultural and creative fields: artists, academic institutions, organisations, students, entrepreneurs, etc. But Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest weren’t the only Romanian cities to develop important With major events postponed for 2022, the Romanian cultural sector is trying to find a way to navigate through these uncertain times. Let’s take a look back at what happened in 2021.

By Oana Vasiliu

projects for the creative industries this year. FEPIC (the Federation of Creative Industries Employers) developed the first hub that’s exclusively dedicated to the creative industries in Iasi, in partnership with the City Hall. The “Creative Hub” cultural project, conceptually named Iasi Creative Space, aims to create a temporary, unconventional space with a national reach and international connectivity. The hub brings creative industries into a space that can support young artists with the help of entrepreneurs in those industries and support art in all its forms. With the coronavirus pandemic having impacted the cultural sector much more strongly than it did others, the FEPIC initiative comes as a helping hand in getting back to an active cultural life, in a city that is internationally famous for the names it has brought to the field.

At the beginning of August, art and technology festival RADAR launched FAR (Future Artistic Requirements), a new platform for the education and development of the new media art community, supported by UniCredit Bank. FAR connects the educational, cultural, and creative sectors with new creative environments and explores the applicability of emerging technologies in the cultural and artistic field, digital skills, and new trades. The developers of this interdisciplinary platform aim to explore and develop a model of creative economy that brings together new media experts (teachers, artists, etc.), beneficiaries (pupils, students, young artists, etc.), employers and funders, but also academia (UNARTE, UNATC, UBB), to be joined by relevant public policy actors on culture, innovation, art, technology, emerging cultural heritage, and education.