Changes Here at Culturala
A review of what we've been up to here at culturala, upcoming changes and an ask for your feedback <3
Dear Friends,
It’s coming up to a year since we published the first issue of culturala. In summer we would have had two years since we started sending these newsletters. It’s been a long journey, and we’ve learnt a lot together with you.
In the beginning, culturala was just an idea and a desire to change how things work in the art world. It came from a frustration with art jargon and with the disconnectedness that, it turned out, was shared by many. We’ve since tried a few different things, and worked with a whole bunch of different people, but the idea, the fight and the need to change it all has remained the same.
Building a community
In the beginning, we used to write emails to everyone who’s work we liked. We didn’t have a website or any social media profiles, we just had a solid idea: we want to make a community and a journal, and we want the way we speak about art and culture to change. Theoretical? Yes. Current? Yes. Inaccessible? No.
The response was tremendous. We never expected people to be so happy to work with us, to meet each other, to exchange and to write pieces for our first issue with solely the promise of payment when and if we manage to get the money. After numerous grant rejections, we followed the advice of Henry Ward and launched a crowdfunding campaign. I never thought we’d get the support we got. None of us did.
Publishing a journal
Finally, we had the content, the design and the money. But we’d never published before and printing prices and delivery times skyrocketed amidst Brexit and the pandemic. The funding we’d asked for wasn’t enough to make what we wanted, and the publication had ended up pretty hefty by then (70 pages). It took endless back-and-forth conversations to get it right, possible in the end only thanks to the patience of a friend’s dad who worked with printing – and who did the printing for us. In the end, we found a solution. And we had a journal!
We found stockists and almost sold out all our issues (there’s a few left here!). We continued to publish newsletters, support artists, writers and collectives, helping with whatever connections and knowledge we could. We started working on the next issues and building a possible public programme.
What next?
We’ve been running all of this while working full-time jobs, figuring out our own artistic practices and trying to make ends meet in the post-pandemic art world reality. I’ll be honest, despite how incredibly rewarding this has been, it’s also been stressful. In part because we’ve been doing this as a community spread over four different countries. We didn’t have a business structure just because we had a business plan. We didn’t have the capacity, the overhead, the possibility to invest.
So that’s what we’re doing now. We’re re-structuring. While we’re awaiting the design for our next issue on digitalisation, we’ve been looking at what we’ve learnt so far. What works, what doesn’t. What do you guys want? What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Whose works are we not showing? How can we be more transparent with what we’re doing? How do we make an actual, measurable change?
Part of that has been to divide ourselves up into overlapping teams with distinct responsibilities. Another is that we’ve set ourselves clearer objectives and metrics to measure. We’ve also been actively looking for new income avenues through grants and gallery + community sponsors so we can continue to pay our contributors. We’ve decided that we want to give more free content on top of the journal: we’ve already started online film screenings and now we’ve also got a plan for monthly open calls for online publication. Writers, keep your eyes open – or just pitch us directly.
We’d also like to ask you guys what you think about our newsletter. Your help would mean everything to us and it would only take 2-3 minutes of your time by filling out this form here: https://forms.gle/SiBdugw7HbkeUifG8.
You’ll be getting some more update newsletters from us from now on, but first, some exciting news! We’ve got our first founding sponsor, Roger Preece, who’s been an avid supporter of culturala and of art communities more generally. Welcome Roger onboard :)
And with that I wish you all a great end of your week.
With love,
Maria & the Culturala Team