FiraTàrrega, one of Europe’s biggest international gathering for Outdoor Arts, took place between 5th and 8th September 2024. Our Director Sho teamed up with XTRAX’s Maggie Clarke to take part in the trade show representing the UK Outdoor Arts scene. There is decreasing representation of UK artists in FiraTàrrega and other international festivals since Brexit, so it felt important that we work together to address this. Tàrrega for one had none from UK this year…
International Networking
Maggie and Sho met the Spanish Minister of Culture at the trade show. We thanked them for their support for FiraTàrrega and the international networking it facilitates, but we also called on FiraTàrrega and the Ministry to increase collaboration with UK artists again. We also promised that we will continue to work with our Arts Councils to ensure our Government’s promise to rebuild relationships with Europe is kept.
Circostrada
XTRAX and OAUK are also part of Circostrada’s Street Arts subgroup, which has been set up recently to ensure Street Arts have an equal voice to Circus members, who outnumber us by some margin in Circostrada. It was great to have this strategic meeting, and for Sho to introduce himself to European colleagues. It was particularly useful to meet Outdoor Arts Associations from other countries, namely Ireland, Portugal and Italy. We also said goodbye to Stéphane Segreto-Aguilar, who is leaving his post as Circostrada’s coordinator to take charge of France’s Creative Europe Desk next month. We wished him well and thanked him for the amazing growth of Circostrada he has achieved in the nine years.
UK Colleagues
It was also great to meet up with colleagues from UK. There was a great photo opportunity at the Catalan Arts lunch reception, where Mikey Martins and Phil Hargreaves stood side by side. Phil has just begun working in his new role as the Artistic Director of Freedom Festival in Hull last week, picking up the baton from Mikey, who is now directing Oerol Festival in the Netherlands.
OutdoorArtsUk Digital Brochure
OutdoorArtsUK promoted our artist members to international programmers using our brand-new Digital Brochure, the callout for which had been circulating for the last few weeks. Thank you to those who submitted their work. The brochure was promoted to the Tàrrega delegates using a QR code on postcards, and you can see the final version of the brochure here.
We plan to expand our digital brochure heading into our National Conference on 6th February 2025 in Stoke-on-Trent (save the date info here), so members will have another opportunity to submit work soon. In addition to tour-ready work, we are planning to create a new work section in the brochure, where you can submit short pitching videos, and there’ll also be a chance for existing shows to make amendments to the information currently in the brochure. We hope this will become a resource for our artist and festival members to connect and begin conversation about exciting new and existing work.
