Part of Something Good

The redakcjaBB project brings together creative young people from Bielsko-Biała and the surrounding area. Together and with the support of mentors, they organize workshops, meetings, debates, they create texts, take photos, make graphics, produce films and then publish their work in redakcjaBB magazine and on their website. The topics and direction of the initiative are decided by the young people taking part in the project and currently, the community consists of several hundred people.

This summer the team of redakcjaBB had a conversation with Chris. Here is part of it and the whole interview you can read in English here or in Polish here.

First of all, introduce yourself, what do you do? Who are you? 

My name is Chris Baldwin. By training I am a theatre director, and for the last 15 years of my career I've been directing mainly projects for European Capitals of Culture in Europe. I was a creative director of Galway, European Capital of Culture, curator for Interdisciplinary Arts for Wrocław 2016, director of big events for Kaunas 2022, and last year I directed the opening events for Elefsina ECOC in Greece. I trained as a theatre director and an actor, but I'm very, very interested in multidisciplinary work, working with new audiences or audiences who perhaps aren’t necessarily conscious of the profound role that culture plays in all of our lives.. I'm very interested in how culture becomes a way in which we can talk to one another. 

You told me about how you like to engage communities through your plays. How do you engage people? Is caring about a community important? 

We're all responsible for one another. In a way it takes one or two people to have a baby, but it takes a village to bring the baby up - it takes a society infact, and then all of those voices that that baby has to be able to listen to and respond to, and think about what makes sense for them, and not be oppressed by those different voices so as not to lose their own voice. 

As we grow up our lives become more complex or sophisticated. Having a very strong sense of oneself, but also being conscious of the role the ego can play in those things – to make things more complicated – requires negotiation with oneself and with others. We can go to therapy – that sometimes is really helpful, absolutely fundamental in life – but more often that not we have achieved something similar through culture. We do it through book reading. We do it through the music we listen to. We do it through the people we talk to in the bar. That's all cultural activity. 

So I think that although we're often led to believe that we're deeply individualistic creatures, that idea actually falls apart the moment we try to walk outside. If I want to walk down the road and everyone is driving their car does so as an individual, I would be dead in three seconds. If I hurt myself and need to get to a hospital. I need people who decicated their lives 20 years ago to training the doctor who's going help me. So the idea of being completely an individual is nonsense. We're utterly dependent on one another, utterly dependent. 

And therefore I'm passionate about the idea that, even when culture is provocative, difficult, extreme, rude, it's doing something in order to create dialogue. And, hopefully, we can create the systems and the structures around that. So that kind of provocation or sometimes even cruelty or cruelness – because there's a space for that in culture – can nevertheless be used for us to work out what it is that makes us human, what's important for us as human beings? 

Sometimes, cruelty is the reality. Can it also bring people together because they've experienced it? 

I mean, this is perhaps a niche conversation for a bit later, but I think we can't help but turn on the news at the moment and not want to look. I'm 61, I have three daughters and I've got grandchildren, and I'm looking at the news every day. I'm participating in the world and I'm thinking about the cruelty. Many of us contribute towards systems of cruelty when actually, there must be a reinforced attempt by all of us to contribute kindness and solidarity and space for one another's differences to emerge. That's what culture is for me. 

So when I talk about cruelty, what I mean is, there is a cruel side to what it means to be a human being. But we can't simply rest with that statement. I'm not a religious person so I don't look to something else to tell me how to be kind. I have to look to myself and others. Culture is the way we civilise ourselves and remain positive, remain hopeful that we can progress with our empathy towards others. These might sound like very simple ideas but there are now over 8 billion people on our planet. The planet isn't getting bigger, resources are not getting more plentiful, so we have to learn to share. And if we don't share, we're going to become a more cruel society. 

I'm not prepared to be part of the world that's more cruel every day. I want to contribute to something that is kinder, and we find a way of sharing those resources in a humanistic way, and in a way which is based on solidarity, not individual concepts of “it's my right to consume as much as I want”. 

How would you involve the younger generation in the city’s life and cultural life? What should we do to be a part of the process of making the choices for our future? 

The lovely concept at the centre of the Bidbook is the City of Weave. This is why I was really attracted to working with you guys.

A weave in Spanish is tejido, it means interwoven. It's like the word tissue in English. So if we are a tissue, if we are a weave as a city, what does that imply? Well, it means a tissue has to be resilient.. It has to support. It has to create knots, it helps to create an additional strength by people creating those knots and coming together. 

And I thought, well, if we take that idea a bit further, it means that we have to have, presumably, a respect for agency, for the fact that individuals have impact on each other. We have to have respect for people to have differences. That we're not imposing our own understanding of the world on one another. Whether that's to do with the history of our families, our gender identities, our experiences as autonomous human beings in life – all of these things have to be respected and given space. 

That's where young people come into this very strongly. But I haven't got a series of projects in my mind that will enable people to do that. I think the lovely thing about this project is it invites young people to come forward and say: “Look, here's the idea.” 

This project is an invitation to explore how we're interdependent on one another. What do you need to stay in Bielsko-Biała? What do you need in order to go and discover other countries and places? What do you need in order to go and come back or go and come back and come back and go? What do you need? Use this process to define how you can contribute not just to Bielsko-Biała but to the millions of other cities that exist. 

I spent a lot of my life travelling, moving from one country to the other. And perhaps now I'm coming to the conclusion that actually, we are so similar, we really do need each other. What differentiates us is the stories we tell to one another. We often create lovely, completely fictitious, stupid stories about why those people, over there, are different to us, and why we can't therefore congregate anywhere near them or share our valuable resources with them.To counter that we have to start with a deep dialogue with one another. A long conversation about what it is that makes us move towards this concept of well being? The answer is the idea of weave and well-being. It’s a sense of agency, a sense of co-creativity that we work together through these ideas to create visions and experiences that make sense to us. And yeah, we have to keep it open, and then invite people to come in and say: “OK, could I do this?” 

Let me imagine something here. A young person may come and say, “I want to connect the mountains to the river Biała. I want to do it by somehow making a radio show between the top of a mountain and somebody on a boat. And I want them to be speaking different languages from the different periods where people spoke different languages in Bielsko-Biała.” Now, if someone comes with that idea, and wants to use a radio studio and make a podcast from it, we can sit down around a table and say: “OK, if that's what you want do, do you know this artist X or Y ? Do you know there's this project happening in Latvia or Spain? Have a meeting with those guys online and see what you can come up with. And when you've got an idea, come back and we'll work out how to support you and get it funded.” That's how a European Capital of Culture should work I think. It should work through listening, setting a setting, a kind of platform. Then those platforms – those weaves – coming together to help projects progress. To explore what we need through dialogue, coming up with the projects that deliver those objectives. It's an invitation for young people. 

You can read the whole interview in the e-book: in English here or in Polish here.

Check also the official website of redakcjaBB.