What if art could transform your town? How would you start? What artform would you choose? Who would you collaborate with, and how would you do it? What if you had $350,000 to spend over a year developing and presenting an artistic project that would bring people together and create a lasting legacy for your town?
Regional Arts Victoria is inviting you to do more than just imagine: start thinking, get talking, and plan your small town transformation.
For small towns with big ideas, Regional Arts Victoria presents Small Town Transformations on behalf of the Victorian Government. We’re funding transformative artistic projects that are connected to community and place, for and by small Victorian towns with fewer than 1,500 people. Proposals will be able to request up to $350,000 for their project, which must be presented in collaboration between at least two partners.
It’s time to think big. Art has the uniquely transformative power to bring people together, inspire fresh perspectives, compose new ideas, build confidence and resilience, promote health and wellbeing, teach new skills, foster new connections and create places that are welcoming, stimulating and unique.
The places we’re drawn to the most are the places where we can experience the new, recognise the familiar, and feel creatively stimulated in the context of our everyday movements. We want to feel at home in the ambition of our most audacious ideas. We want people to recognise our home town for its creative potential, and we want that potential to be realised in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.
Where do you experience art? Talk about art? Make art? Find creative collaborators? Meet before or after a show? Where do you gather with your local communities? How do you attract people from far and wide to celebrate what’s unique about your town? How would neighbouring towns describe the creative heart of your town? What would it mean to bring the entire community together to participate in a creative transformation? How might performance, craft, literature, architecture, design or a diversity of creative practices achieve this?
Creative places stimulate more than just further innovation; they boost local business and tourism, as well as building strong and resilient communities. Yet not every town enjoys a productive balance of creativity and practicality. Small towns in particular may have plenty of ideas but lack the resources to create a gathering space from an underutilised public space, or produce an impactful en masse participatory arts project, or reimagine an existing building into a public space for the arts.
Do your local artists constantly come up with big public ideas that can’t be funded? Does your main street need a designer or architect to create a meaningful focal point that would inspire everyone? Do you have a public space that’s waiting to become a performance space? Have you got a great idea for a participatory project that would involve everyone in town? Are you keen to develop and present a creative project that would boost local business and tourism? Now, in Victoria, there’s the rare opportunity to create exactly that kind of transformation for your town.
Join the discussion about how art can transform your town at http://smalltowns.rav.net.au. Across Australia and across the world, case studies abound on the ways in which art has transformed a town because artists and communities have made ambitious new work, attracted critical masses of people, had a significant impact on a town-wide scale, and left a lasting legacy of inspiration. The Small Town Transformations launch site will feature new examples all summer – from vast, arid Lake Ballard near Menzies in remote WA, to the small alpine town of Vercorin in Switzerland – and first stage applications will open on Monday, 14 January.
Think big. Join the discussion and harness your town’s potential as a place of inspiration.
