Why invest in culture? Because The Beatles, jeans, and Coca-Cola killed communism. There is more truth to this than one might imagine.
Since the value and role of work with culture was understated in Belarus, the country transformed into a collective-farm dictatorship, with underdeveloped political alternatives and a petrified electorate. Following the forced emigration of its creative elite, cultural terror is now the principal method of breeding loyalty.
At its most diverse, culture is much more than a series of messages, a package of texts, a set of values and lifestyles, or a collection of artefacts. It is also a range of social activities that allow a nation to define its identity. More importantly, it is a resource for us to organise ourselves and determine what and who we permit ourselves to be.
A nation’s culture is a variety of exercises in identity. Therefore, protecting culture means more than supporting education and the culture industry. It also implies defending national sovereignty and mental independence.
Supporting culture in a post-colonial, “small” nation is essentially a matter of life and death, as unimpeded pop-culture, media, and intellectual interference from the “Russian world” is actively converting a formally independent state into a province of the neighbouring empire.
Any normal cultural ecosystem constantly seeks out new concepts and critical expertise, favouring regular staff turnover and interaction between various levels of cultural production, striving to attract cultural consumers, and seeking renewal. Yet none of this is occurring in Belarus today.
A healthy culture cannot exist in a sick society, and a society with a sick culture cannot be healthy. Because Belarusian culture has ended up in the unique position of being driven out of its own country, it has been forced to adjust its strategies, tactics, and overall mission.
Obviously, Belarusian culture and arts today are distributed both inside the country and abroad, and have transcended the basic creation of cultural products.
In recent years, after proving itself to be the “cement” that unites and binds various political and civil-society entities, Belarusian culture has acquired the status of being “more than culture”.
By investing in culture, we support social responsibility and civil activism. We are investing in the right to creative self-determination and equal opportunities for personal growth. We support the right to live, to choose our own future, and to enjoy creative freedom.
Essentially, we are aiming to reanimate our nation. This is more than culture.
To all intents and purposes, there are two key dimensions of new Belarusian culture today: 1) legal, public, exportable creative projects; and 2) undercover cultural resistance inside the country. In the short term, our task is to stitch these two trends together into a common, virtual, supranational Belarusian cultural field.
The strategic goal is to overcome the dual inhibitions of Lukashenko’s inertly “stable” regime and the culture shock of the “failed revolution”. Both these cultural models have run out of steam.
The general task is not to provide one-off subsidies with imposed management, but to revive the cultural dynamic, which is also the basis for self-organisation of civil society.
We aim to initiate a new cycle, which is common in culturally developed countries, but which never emerged in Belarus, for obvious reasons. It hinges on training artists, educating audiences, widespread promotion, critically analysing the system, etc. But with one additional, crucial feature arising from the specifics of the Belarusian cultural field: its increased influence on politics, society, and the economy.
Once again, this is more than culture.
Instead of discussing the creation of “new ministries”, we should devise new rules to foster an environment conducive to self-organised creative communities. Not a hierarchical power structure, but horizontal networks and creative alliances.
What are we building? Not some nostalgically old-fashioned Brighton Beach-style enclave, but a living, competitive environment – an active segment of the global cultural field; a zone of genuine European communication and joint creative projects; a Belarusianness above and beyond borders; a more flexible identity.
More than culture implies social activism through creative practice, in order to design a post-totalitarian nation.
