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Introduction :

Q : Why do we think we have to train people ? Why A.M.I. is interested in cultural management training ? :

A : No one can ignore to-day (including in this part of the world where public or private ressources for Culture are limited) that there is no point to support the artist, the creation process, if an integrated dissemination process is not a part of the general planning architecture. In other term, at short sight, no manager, no integrated chain of activity (filière) means no artistic production.

When we deliver some budget line for the artists, we automatically must keep some money for her/his “manager” and “treatment professionnals”, without whom there will be no mobility, no autonomy, no surviving. It is a basic question of making sense.

Five influent changing (or unchanging) paradygmes :

1) Around Mediterranean Sea, north and south, member-states of the Barcelona process still instrumentalise culture for the sake of “national prestige”. The “dialogue interculturel” is always seen by them as a dialogue between Ministeries of Culture, from a pyramid to another. Their absence (or weak presence) from the true cultural agenda gradually leaves the space, for the good and the bad, to supra-national institutions (foundations, global institutions), and Europe. Influence and power in this field is shifting.

2) An antagonistic result of the fast-growing technological environnement tends to replace top-down hyper-centralised global “mono-color” monopolistic industries by a very diverse “bottom-up” multi-lateral “do-it-yourself” local productions. Nobody can stop this. The public answer to the field has to adapt.

3) Despite the pauperistic image frequently given (almost insulting at some point), there is a lot of money available for Culture in this part of the world. It is the duty of the cultural sector to understand and invent new strategies to get it. You do not catch a leopard with a salad leave. You do not catch an antilope with a sausage… And training costs…

4) It is of utmost importance to re-create a link of understanding and mutual respect, to keep an open bridge with “popular masses”. Elitisme is one of the greater danger to come. This does not mean that we should stop supporting experimental forms. It means we have to justify them honnestly in the frame of tax-payers public expenditure. More than ever, we have to give ourselves serious and strong arguments on this matter.

5) 435 M inhabitants around this sea, 118 M under the age of 15, most of them having “cultural” activities. Culture is a strategic “heavy weight”, not just the mean to “have fun after a heavy day of work”. Most of the current conflicts have “cultural” causes. Keep on reminding it to the powerfull circles.

Four axes to enhance autonomy for the cultural activists :

Weither you are a public or private organisation, non-prfit or business-oriented, you cannot work on one element without the perspective of the three others.

1) the artistic approach : supporting quality and innovation means proposing specific products that do not exist elsewhere.

2) the economical axe : opening new markets, regional or global

3) the educational axe : life long learning, flexibility, adaptation capacities

4) the diplomatic issue : culture activists exist within a geography. They need to prevent conflicts

Some crucial requirements :

1) establishing in common, and respecting a basic set of “laws”, of good practices

2) privilegiating a crossed approach, institutions and disciplines, private and public, cultural and extra-cultural

3) constantly integrating multi-lateral vision (multi partnership)

4) optimising technological ressources (it could be also cheap technologies, or low-cost ressources)

5) sharing information. In the cultural field, a kept-secret information means concurrence, in opposition to networking. For human-size fragile cultural enterprises, secret means death. Sharing means added-value for the community.