The second in our series of reports on creative dialogues between Future Arts Centres members and international partners:

The New Nordic: Lessons from Sentralen and Kulturhuset in Oslo.

“What’s the difference between a dead cat on the motorway and a dead banker on the motorway? There are skidmarks around the cat”

That hoary old joke was delivered by Vince Cable in 2011, then Business Secretary in the coalition government. Not unexpectedly it didn’t go down well with many of London’s financial institutions.

Over in Oslo, things were a little different. Martin Eia-Revheim (a former social worker, jazz club owner and one-time director of the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra) was re-telling this joke to the 20 or so bankers: shareholders and members of the DNB Savings Bank Foundation. They’d just bought a 10,000 m2 former DNB bank building in downtown Oslo with the intention of turning it into a centre for cultural production and innovation and bringing all of its resident people and organisations together to find new solutions for addressing social challenges.

As I’m sure the shareholders will have reminded themselves: not even the most talented dead cat could do that.

Sentralen, the organisation that emerged through DNB Saving Bank largesse and which Eia-Revheim is ‘The Manager’, contains 8 performance and rehearsal spaces (largely focused on music), space for more than 350 cultural producers and companies, various meeting rooms for use by creative businesses, plus there’s a thriving restaurant and informal café spaces spread throughout the building. I visited Sentralen on five separate occasions during August and Nov 2017 and each time I found a bustling, buzzy, active, exciting building housing everything from school orchestra rehearsals to 1,200 plus sellout events as part of the annual Oslo World festival.

What’s perhaps most impressive about the project is that the 350 or so cultural producers which occupy the range of open-plan spaces across the building at below market-level rates, are also expected to demonstrate how they will achieve ‘social good’ beyond their core purpose, as well as how they would work with other resident organisations to achieve this. It’s clearly early days but it’ll be interesting to review the social impact work that Sentralen say they are producing for publication in 2019.

Half a mile away from Sentralen is another of Oslo’s new-wave of cultural institutions: Kulturhuset, which opened in 2013. Like Sentralen it receives no public subsidy, but is another thriving, buzzy venue, in which the social dimension of cultural production and experience has been brilliantly realised.

Kulturhuset started as a three-year temporary project in a building that was set to be demolished, but, in a relatively short period, has become an essential part of the new cultural ecology of the city. With initial investment from the Oslo-based real estate developer Olav Thon, the team behind Kulturhuset raised almost 50 million krona (around £45m) from private sources to fully purchase and fully refurbish the four-story townhouse for permanent cultural use.

Kulturhuset announces itself as a ‘meeting place for culture’ and it certainly is: every nook and cranny appears to be teeming with people having formal or informal meetings, or rehearsing and presenting events. On any given day or night the place is filled with debates, concerts, nightlife, games, coffee shops, 24-hour food and what is arguably Oslo’s most social open office community. It stages more than 2,000 individual events and attracts more than 400,000 people through its 2,000 m2 of space every year.

What can we learn from the experience of Sentralen and Kulturhuset? Two things stood out for me.

Firstly, the sense of ‘relevance’ was very strong among the people who ran and used these institutions. There was a sense that this relevance came from an openness, informality and the lack of orthodoxy allied to a sense that some of the more traditional cultural institutions were struggling for relevance and had lost their way. Many people I spoke with (audiences and users) said that these institutions (Sentralen and Kulturhuset) understood how to create experiences and spaces that people wanted to inhabit and this wasn’t always the case across the cultural sector.

Secondly, the commitment by both institutions to the idea of contributing to ‘social good’ through cultural expression and production was strongly present in each organisation’s work, through addressed in different ways (Sentralen through its expectations of the resident community, Kulturhuset through its sense of occupying a central role in stimulating, supporting and hosting civic debate).

As the cultural sector in the UK and parts of Europe is likely to face significant disruption over the coming years (technology, money, changing patterns of consumption) it will be fascinating to see how these new model and novel institutions perform in the wake of such changes and how they can help us address some of our own opportunities and challenges in the years ahead.

Sentralen: https://www.sentralen.no/en/
Kulturhuset: http://kulturhusetioslo.no/

Eddie Berg, Chief Executive, Rich Mix
@EftBerg