Keep It Complex

The #SolidarityKnowsNoBorders weekend of action starts tomorrow! Share, support, and join an action near you (or online!). #brighton #bristol #hastings #manchester #sheffield #london #cambridge #liverpool buff.ly/2GEV16M

Video just released from our @MigrantsCulture event with the incredible @keep_it_complex and partners such as @LIFTfestival @UnisNotBorders @CounterArts @ShubbakFestival, Raven Row, the brilliant @krisanthenum @season_butler and over 100 migrant culture workers. Check it out!!

Are you interested in creating a solidarity syndicate but need more members? Tag @keepitcomplex in your Instagram posts or stories and we’ll share it with other creatives looking to syndicate. Easy. #solsyn

Today applications open for the Arts Council England’s “emergency fund”. Are you ready to make a solidarity syndicate but still have questions how to make it happen? FAQs are now on our website: makeitclear.eu/posts/solidari… #solsyn #acegrams

Adapt the #solsyn to your context & needs, share, share, share!

Not everyone is going to be able to apply for this @acegrams ‘emergency’ funding. Let’s join up and play the lottery together. Why? To support your peers! Refuse competition! It’s all of us or none of us! Take back the economy! Full instructions: makeitclear.eu/posts/sol-syn/

Darren Henley gets £178,000 a year. Think he could manage on a one off grant of £2,500 for the foreseeable future?

We are unable to pay bills, meet rent or maintain our expenses; within weeks incomes have vanished. @aceagrams responds by reducing our funding and making us compete in an impossible lottery. We need support and care and access, not competition and austerity.

This is not an emergency response. This is Business as usual. Playing the Art Gods with our projects. makeitclear.eu/posts/sol-syn/

... leaving creatives and small organisations to fight for the scraps. This is not an emergency response. This is Business as usual. Supporting some creatives, but never all creatives.

@aceagrams scrapped all the funds normally available for creative individuals and small organisations in order to provide this “emergency fund”. Those grants used to provide a whole ecosystem with work, but now £90K of that money has been re-allocated to the big bois,...

This doesn’t just affect those that put the applications in, but an ecology of creatives that would have been paid as part of their projects. This is not an emergency response. This is Business as usual. Playing the Art Gods with our projects.

With no consultation, nor the chance to come up with creative alternatives, these projects have all been cancelled, backdating the stress and financial debt of the crisis.

Applications in process were terminated by @aceagrams for this “emergency fund”. @aceagrams wants to silo us off from one another; letting the individual rise to the top or fall to the bottom.

This is not an emergency response. This is Business as usual. Pitting creatives against each other to compete for a limited funding.

...composers, craft makers, curators and more. So @aceagrams have created an emergency fund that only 1% of the creative community can access. @aceagrams this is not a “small proportion”, this is the absolute minority.

@artistsunionengland tells us there are 60,000 artists working in the UK. If every artist applied for £2500 only 6,400 would get it… that’s 10%. But we’re not just artists; we’re writers, translators, producers, editors, educators, directors, designers, choreographers...

That’s not an emergency response, that’s cuts. Austerity in a time of crisis - how is that an emergency response @aceagrams ? makeitclear.eu/posts/sol-syn/

Of the £97.3 Million usually available for individuals, organisations, museums and libraries, £90 million is now for the NPOs that already have existing funding from @aceagrams . Individuals used to have access to £30.4 million funding, now it’s just £20 million…

Last year @aceagrams spent £30.4 million on individual creatives, but the emergency fund that replaces all other 2020/21 grants is just £20 million. @aceagrams you are competing for an even smaller pot of £16 million