Culture Inaction Europe

Just before Christmas (AP230) ArtsProfessional published news of our “David and Goliath” battle with the EU Culture Agency to rescue our project from the hands of a slippery project partner. The battle goes on, characterised by an absence of any meaningful communication from the Agency and a refusal to involve my company, Escape Artists, in new proposals being drawn up for progressing the project.

It's ironic that, on agreeing to participate in an EU Culture Agency project, as we did early last year, participants are required to sign a half an inch thick contract with the project’s lead partner. Whether the contract is worth the paper is the big question of the moment: it now appears that, if a lead partner decides to completely ignore the contract and run it in any old way that they want to, there is nothing much that the other project partners can do about it.

What is even more astonishing is that the EU Cultural Agency, supposedly overseeing the project and ensuring that EU funds are used for the purposes for which they have been designated, doesn't seem to care at all if the contract between the partners is ignored by the lead partner – the partner that just happens to hold all the EU funds in its account. From personal experience I can tell you that the uncertainty and loss of income that arises from getting stuck in a project that is so poorly run results in deep damage to company morale. This cannot even begin to be repaired until the Agency demonstrates that it is actually taking these matters seriously. We have written dozens of emails to them and provided them with a mountain of evidence that clearly shows how our project is being mismanaged, but they steadfastly refuse to take any action. Their priority seems to be to pass the buck and to find endless new ways in which they can avoid having to take action. From our perspective they look like experts in obfuscation whose first instinct is to bury a problem before even bothering to investigate its causes, because this makes life so much easier for them. Once one comes to the conclusion that this is how they operate, then it becomes increasingly hard to summon up the energy to try and put things right.

If Escape Artists was a well funded organisation, that could afford to take legal action against lead partner CETEC for the damage inflicted on the company, and if we had the resources to battle against the lassitude that seems to infect the management of the Cultural Agency, then I'm sure that we would. But we don't have the kind of resources needed to take on these challenges. The only thing we can do is to raise awareness of these failings of EU Culture Agency projects, in the hope that, through open scrutiny in the media, the Agency is embarrassed into pulling its finger out and doing the job for which, I'm sure, its staff are very well paid.