Beyond Curiosity and Desire: Towards Fairer International Collaborations in the Arts

Authors: Mike van Graan | Published by: IETM, On the Move, DutchCulture | Year: 2018

This toolkit was produced jointly by three European arts networks — IETM, On the Move, and DutchCulture — and written by Mike van Graan, South African playwright and UNESCO expert on cultural diversity. It is the most directly applicable resource for Building Strong International Partnerships video, but it also informs Organisations Ready for Projects video and connects thematically to Green Mobility in Arts and Culture, which was co-facilitated by Marie Le Sourd of On the Move — one of the document's editors.

The toolkit opens by naming the two fault-lines that shape all international artistic collaboration: structural inequality and cultural difference. It then works through the practical questions organisations must answer before entering a partnership — partner history, language, visa access, fee parity, administrative capacity — followed by ten tips for managing inequality between collaborators.

A central section presents three models for sequencing idea, funding, and partner, examining the power implications of each. At the heart of the document is a proposed framework for fair collaboration, structured as a facilitated dialogue tool covering aims, contributions, governance, expectations, and exit strategy. This is supported by seven first-person case studies from practitioners in India, Hungary, Mexico, Peru, Australia, Indonesia, Italy, and the USA-Egypt context, each showing a different dimension of where international collaborations succeed or break down. The toolkit closes with relevant excerpts from the 2005 UNESCO Convention and the 2017 European Parliament resolution on international cultural relations.

• Organisations approaching the content of Building Strong International Partnerships will find this document most useful at the pre-project stage, when deciding whether and how to enter a new international collaboration — particularly the partner-finding section and the proposed negotiation framework. 
• For Organisations Ready for Projects, the questions in the pre-engagement section function as an organisational readiness checklist, complementing the self-assessment work that webinar introduces.
• The connection to Green Mobility in Arts and Culture: Beyond the Dilemma? is more contextual: On the Move's framing of mobility as a structural, not individual, question — described in the introductory pages — provides useful background for the discussion of why green mobility cannot be reduced to individual choices.

Because the document was published in 2018, specific funding programme names and URLs cited in the text should be verified before use; the conceptual framework and all case studies remain fully valid. The full document is freely available under a CC BY-NC-ND licence.