Solar Associates

As part of its work for the West London Story, Solar Associates has begun working with the Festivals Forum based in west London's Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Earlier this week, we convened a capacity building workshop session for this group of festival producers. A rich range of experiences were in the space, including representatives from Chelsea Festival, Earl's Court Festival, Notting Hill Carnival, Portobello Film Festival and Portobello Music Festival.

We had an animated afternoon - among the aspects we explored were how the Forum might present a collective face to the world that transcends the sum of its (already impressive) parts, and what the producers might want on the shelves of their shared 'festivals cupboard' (real or virtual). There's clear fundraising leverage and resource efficiency to be gained, and perhaps gains that will enhance artistic outputs as well.

The Forum provides an excellent (and all too rare) opportunity to explore what ongoing collaboration between these very different festivals might look and feel like, before they find themselves locked into a future partnership. It's a under-discussed common experience within the UK arts scene for all too many 'partnerships' to amount to little more than project-based agreements over how a shared money-pot will work, with scant consideration of, and preliminary discussion about, the natural compatibilities and flashpoints between partners, and how different organisational cultures will intersect.

It's great to input into something different, and potentially positive. Our personal highlight from the session was hearing about this summer's new collaboration between Notting Hill Carnival and the Ramadan Festival - right now in the UK, there's a clear need to support and invest in inter-cultural initiatives, and accessible ways to create creative platforms that allow different communities to exchange, communicate and understand each other. Oh, and the 'psychogeography' T-shirt worn by Jonathan Barnett (Director of Portobello Film Festival) was great too - showing the range of locations this much-respected Festival has reached into over its long history, and the impressive connections it's established with innovative film-makers and artists (Photo credit: Colin Gregory Palmer).