Impossible Times - Middlesbrough, mima and Crowdfunding

Recent blog from WeDidThis crowdfunding platform on Middlesbrough and mima  >>


Mima's WeDidThis project (currently up for funding >>) will see artist Richard Forster capture the landscape of the North East as he journeys through it. A dialogue between the artist and his audiences  will develop where this journey takes him and how he responds to it. The project is led by the communities it engages both creatively and financially.

"On Monday we made our own journey through the landscape of the North East, gradually making our way up from London to Middlesbrough, to visit the mima team.

Returning to Middlesbrough was important for me. I spent my weekends as a child in Redcar playing on the beach in the sand dunes in the shadow of the ICI steel works and at night sitting in the window of the upstairs window listening to my dad and step mum's records while counting the tanker ships lined up on the horizon queuing to dock in the morning when the dawn came.

I was always drawn to these imposing industrial giants set against the backdrop of the bleak and vast north east coast. I felt that the area spanning between the north Yorkshire moors, Saltburn cliffs where we would collect clay to make things on Saturday afternoons, Roseberry topping that we tobogganed down when it snowed and Middlesbrough town centre where we'd go to the bowling alley or shopping on rainy weekends was populated by people full of stories and who had for generations been at the heart of Victorian industrial Britain and the building of the British empire.

I was born in the early 80s when all this had begun to change and was under threat, by the early 90s when I first moved to the area there were only hints of this seemingly forgotten place of grandeur and economic boom. I would watch young men take their kids for walks along the beach on Sunday afternoons, their one day of the week with them. Single mums and overstretched families facing unemployment and family issues would populate the high street on Saturday morning. Poverty and unemployment was prevalent, as the North East's main source of jobs and industry were shut down and ceased to exist and little was put in place to support those people left there.

Today in 2011 there are echoes of those same challenges facing the North East, although the community is united by different things today and the challenges they face are very different. Cuts in the public sector have affected the whole country and the arts has been one of the victims of these. How can we argue though in a world where even funding our schools and hospitals is difficult, and so many are unemployed- how do we in this climate argue for the survival of the arts?

I am biased. I work in the arts, I am passionate about the arts but first and foremost I believe in the power of the arts to bring about social cohesion and cultural identity. What would the world look like without art and culture? What would unite people and identify communities? How would people present and demonstrate their own cultural histories and tell their stories?

Growing up between London, the North East and Belfast I developed at a young age a passionate belief in the need for social equality and cohesion, I believed in the rights of all people and I was very aware of the stark contrast between the privileges of many while others had nothing. For me pursuing a career in the arts has enabled me to pursue my passions and beliefs for social development and to inform change. In my opinion arts and culture, and the audiences they all seek to engage, form the backbone and platform for communities to be able to identify themselves, to contextualise and to make sense of the world in which they live, and the challenges they are faced with.

Middlesbrough is no different. In a city faced with massive poverty and social deprivation (like it or not) stands in its centre the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. It is as discovered a powerful gleaming giant of glass and concrete, standing powerfully and arrestingly in the middle of the town centre. It is opposite the town's civic buildings, including the town hall, the registry office and it is next door to the library which is housed in a redbrick building at the far end. This modernist expression is striking and transparent- it is free to anyone to come inside and experience its collection, and it symbolises the massive efforts of the city's council in previous years to regenerate the centre and create an attractive and inviting cultural hub for the people of Middlesbrough. But this gallery like so many across the country is under threat, its funding like everyone else's has been cut, and they are searching for new ways to generate money in these impossible times.

It is a hard battle to fight, the argument seems lost before we've begun, how do we ask for money when we can see so many others suffering? But unless arts organisations like this keep fighting these places will be empty run down shells of their former selves in a few years time. Middlesbrough will no longer have a gleaming grand art gallery in the heart of it, there will not be a cultural hub at it's centre, the free workshops for young people won't exist and the cafe, full when we ate there today, will not open anymore. The permanent collections will be shut away in dusty old storage rooms in the dark hidden from the public they were intended for.

But what can we do about it?

MIMA is one of the first organisations to get on board with and launch a project campaign with wedidthis. They have bravely asked their supporters and individuals behind the arts and who believe in the greater role the cultural and arts sector plays within a larger social context to turn their support into financial donations. Their goal is ambitious, but by buying a reward for as little as £20 you can help crowd fund the work that MIMA is doing and make a real difference to Middlesbrough's cultural future."

Hen Norton, WeDidThis