Recently, instead of receiving birthday presents, we asked friends and family to contribute to a small Gift Culture experiment that would help money flow towards human creativity and cultural life in Western Australia and elsewhere around the world. More than 20 people and one business contributed around $1,500AUD to the experiment.
We gave away all of this money to some of the many individuals and organisations fostering cultural renewal – fostering the generation of new thoughts, meanings, stories, values, identity – through education, research, art, spacemaking for social innovation etc., including those who are actively re-imagining the social organism as a whole, as well as money itself.
In so doing we have attempted to provide a homeopathic drop towards new ways of working with money in order to move from the current ‘damming’ of money and streams of capital, towards a freely flowing river of social renewal and healing. This, in turn, will help enable the cultural gifts of human creativity to flow into and transform society as a whole.
We believe that just as a healthy blood-flow enlivens our human organism, so the social organism is enlivened through the healthy flow of money. May this be one of many experiments and initiatives that work in this direction…
Cultural Creatives (and projects) we gifted to:
Katie Teague – Money and Life Documentary. $50US
Phoebe Phillips – Street Art. $50AU
Nathaniel Williams and Laura Summer – Free Columbia Art Course. $50US
Brodie McCulloch – SiiWA and SpaceCubed. $50AU
PSAS: Pakenham Street Art Space. $50AU
Sharon Gregory – Indigenous Noongar Language teaching. $50AU
MC Matre and his platform ‘Gifted’. $50US
Holly Story – Visual Artist. $50AU
Horst Kornberger – Interdisciplinary Artist and Educator. $50AU
The experiment concluded with a Gift Culture Circle in which eight active cultural creatives shared their respective projects for the coming year, as well as their budgets. The remaining money was then divided up evenly (around $130 each) in order to be given away. Potential new projects also arose during the course of the evening.
Cultural Creatives we gifted to during the Gift Culture Circle:
Jennifer Kornberger
Katie Dobb
Ryan Sengara
Rachael West
Tom Mueller
Jayne Bryant
Horst Kornberger
Rhys Stacker
John Stubley
Seed money was also given, during the Gift Culture Circle, to explore:
The possibility of continuing the Gift Culture initiative in some new form.
The possibility of creating a cultural ‘HUB’ space.
The possibility of creating a ‘creative collaboration consulting’ group.
The possibility of creating a ‘thematic experimental artistic action lab’.
Centre for Social Poetry 