Workshops to build cultural intelligence in the arts

ARTS Northern Rivers is hosting a professional development workshop for arts workers on Cultural Intelligence, facilitated by artist, dancer and educator Belle Budden from Kierrabelle Arts.

The foundational workshop includes historical impacts on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and culture, relationships and connections to Country, cultural protocols, respectful relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation and cultural arts.

Arts Northern Rivers project manager Grace Dewar said the workshops were designed for artists and arts workers at all career stages.

“The workshop is identified as being for non-Indigenous artists and arts workers and the motivation to attend is if your practice intersects with First Nations community or artists, which, for many practitioners in this region, it does,” Dewar said.

“It’s important to have that training and for artists who are going out into community and working with First Nations artists to be trained to do so.”

Dewar said Indigenous intersection was a broad term, which she said was self-defined by the artists.

“It’s as simple as wanting to have any engagement or consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and there are some sensitivities in how you engage.”

“How your practice does that is up to the artist or the arts worker, but there are many ways that we work with community, including collaboration, supporting self-determination, having a welcome at an event or consulting on how a project might involve or impact community.”

Dewar said it was not new information that colonisation continued under systems that still exist today, and those systems supported or continued disadvantage.

“Impacts that prevail today will be unpacked through this workshop, so that we can have sensitivities to them because it’s not our lived experience,” she said.

“We’re not living and breathing and walking in these spaces in the way that mob do. Having that awareness and sensitivity to what they face on a day-to-day basis is the bare minimum we can do.”

The workshop will be held at Tweed Regional Gallery on September 9 and at Lismore Regional Gallery on September 18.

For information, contact [email protected]