What better way to understand new forms of leadership and practice in arts, culture and creativity than through live experience?

Across the world there’s a quiet revolution in how people are collectively organising their creative and cultural lives and livelihoods through the establishment of hubs –  fablabs, incubators, co-working, maker, hacker and pop-up spaces, artistic and creative clusters, rehearsal and performance spaces and community and civic networks. There are now thousands of these hubs around the world on every continent and their number grows by the month.

These hubs push practice and impact beyond the ambit of more traditional studios and arts institutions. Put them together and this represents an energetic and enterprising bottom-up global movement foregrounding open and collaborative leadership, vital new business models, pioneering interdisciplinarity and, most crucially, a focus on forging positive social and civic, as well as artistic, solutions to 21st century problems and opportunities.

At the seventh World Cultural Summit, which will be held in Malta between October 18 and 21, Arts Council Malta will be collaborating with The Valletta Design Cluster (a Culture Directorate initiative) and Open Movement (UK) to co-create a lo-fi, Maltese-led pop-up creative hub which invites all conference delegates to pop-in and participate.

The hub encompasses a dedicated physical space within the Summit location (Mediterranean Conference Centre) which is occupied and animated by a small interdisciplinary team of artists, makers, designers, creative technologists and entrepreneurs who live and work in Malta as well as from internationally and who are interested in collaborative practice and purposeful impact. International participating artists and makers hail from various island contexts - Malta, Eigg (Scottish Inner Hebrides) and Sri Lanka, with Mediterranean participants also being prominent – Morocco, Lebanon, and Egypt.

As a pop-up initiative, the hub is an agile workplace meets creative playground.  It operates as an interactive laboratory or ideas camp or hackathon to address and model key issues or ‘challenges’ of interest both in the context of Malta’s future creative development and also to delegates.

This year’s list of international participants coming to Malta specifically for the Pop-Up Hub during the IFACCA World Summit includes the following.

Lucy Conway (UK, Scotland) – Based on the Scottish Isle of Eigg, Lucy is the founder of Eigg Box, a social enterprise that supports island creative individuals and businesses to develop their talent, business skills and markets.  Eigg Box also works with artists and arts organisations nationally and internationally, bringing them to the island to research and develop work. Lucy has worked in the creative and arts sector in the Highlands and Islands for over 30 years.

Rahmo Mohamed (Morocco) – After years of working on start-ups and projects that mix between art, culture and technology, Mohamed Rahmo is now building his own NGO in called madNess which is a structured network of independent resources in art and culture, technology and entrepreneurship providing support, advice, promoting existing initiatives, and designing new ones.

The collective works for the creative commons, open education and free access to culture.

Ruwanthie de Chickera (Sri Lanka) – Ruwanthie is a playwright, screen-writer, theatre director and cultural activist. Her work explores the politics of culture, religion, sexuality, education, violence and art and how these impact on the personal and the public. She has a strong belief in the practice, politics and philosophy of devising – a theatre approach of collective creativity and leadership that challenges existing structures of authorship, power sharing and change. Her award winning film Machan has been screened in over 50 countries.

Mohammad alQaq (Jordan) – Mohammad is a visual artist, with a BA in visual art. He uses different platforms to express his ideas: he’s a singer and filmmaker. He is also a practicing actor, presenter, and photographer. He often serves as a judge panelist for creative graduation projects at several universities. His popular blog Khobbeizeh, the first video-blog in the Arab region, allowed him to venture into the world of media, pavingthe way for different initiatives such as sha-shaboneh, the first Jordanian blogging meeting.

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