The City of Brighton and Hove is renowned for its breath-taking contributions to art and culture. The many artistic and cultural groups, events and their interplay with the universities and other organisations help make Brighton a unique city to live in. The recent closure of the CCA at Brighton University, the proposed compulsory redundancies that look set to decimate the humanities at the University of Brighton, as well as more general issues around cuts, funding, and a cost-of-living crisis seriously threaten the artistic achievements of this city as a whole.

For this very reason we are organising a collaborative conversation aimed at bringing together an array of artists, art groups and organisations, independent interdisciplinary researchers and anyone who contributes to, or benefits from, the cultural make-up of this city.

We’re looking for people who want to collaborate in bringing together material through interviews, conversations, short videos, soundbites or other artistic expressions in order to document people’s experience and give voice and visibility to how the current crisis is affecting us all.

Our main questions are:

How is the current climate around Arts, Humanities and Culture affecting you right now and those around you in Brighton and Hove?

What do you think we need individually or collectively to sustain ourselves into the future.

We are thinking of three elements that could come together:

A collective effort to gather conversations and expressions around our main questions

Manifesto workshops with the aim of creating a repository of manifestos in writing and diverse art form for the city

A series of grass roots encounters, workshops and assemblies to create a coalition that defends our rights and fights for our future.