Culture as resistance: Reflections on seven years of Kingston Creative
Excerpts of a speech by Andrea Dempster Chung Kingston Creative co-founder and executive director, at the Grounation conference 2024
RECLAIMING PHYSICAL space is resistance. Challenging the status quo is resistance. Defining arts and culture as a driver of social and economic transformation is resistance. Putting artists and cultural workers in a position of prominence and status in our society is resistance. Intentionally betting on what is most powerful about us as a country – OUR CULTURE – even though it arguably is created by who we consider to be from the working classes of society – is resistance. Deciding to change our city, our economy and empower our most culturally vibrant communities – is resistance. Imagining a new future together, and taking action together from the ground up, not the top down to realise this new future – this is an act of resistance.
If you ask me on any given day whether I’m ‘into’ politics, I, like many creatives, would say that I am not political. Our politics is framed in a limiting way, as it forces us to think about development in choppy four-year cycles instead of the 25- and 50-year strategic cycles that lead to real transformation and sustainable national development. To be creative, one must be in a certain state of mind and often I find that it is necessary to block out the partisan chatter that we all too often find ourselves embroiled in as a society.
But ‘politics’, from the Greek word ‘politika’, is defined simply as ‘affairs of the cities’. In a very literal sense, politics is just the set of activities associated with making decisions in groups and managing the power relations among individuals. The Irish political scientist Michael Laver, put it this way:
“Politics is about the characteristic blend of conflict and cooperation that can be found so often in human interactions. Pure conflict is war. Pure cooperation is true love. Politics is a mixture of both.”
If I were to abide by the true definition of politics, then the work that we at Kingston Creative are engaged in is very political. Artists and creatives are actively changing the affairs of the city with every mural, every film, every book and every cultural tour.
MASSIVE VISION
Kingston Creative is a movement that came into being seven years ago almost to the day, so let me say first, Happy seventh anniversary to the entire Kingston Creative family. I vividly remember being upstairs in the attic in my home in London, making that call to my co-founder Allan Daisley who was in Miami. My hand was shaking, and I was absolutely full of trepidation. This vision was so big, and I just didn’t want to sound unhinged. I didn’t even want to speak it out loud, but it was so urgent that I felt that I would burst if I didn’t.
Even as a possibility thinker and an eternal optimist, I know how the world works. I am a dark-skinned black person, I am a woman, one with an unremarkable last name at that and no generational wealth to fund a massive vision, so who were we to think that we could really shift the affairs of the city?
But we stepped out in faith and developed our 10-year plan with David Mullings and Jennifer Bailey. I moved back home to Jamaica, and we took another small step forward, first presenting the concept at UWI’s Imagine Kingston conference in 2017. We formed a core team with Doris Gross and Dr Kim Marie Spence. Very rapidly, a group of 100 volunteers and creatives came on board, who all played a critical role in hosting Artwalk festivals and monthly meetups, painting murals and driving this vision forward.
We registered a nonprofit company in 2019, then a charity organisation, and were able to raise money to fund operations. This would not have happened without the support of who we term the First 50 Founders, individuals and companies that donate one million a year because they want to be a part of the transformation of downtown and the economic growth that they believe creative entrepreneurs and the Orange Economy can deliver.
DEVELOPING CREATIVE PEOPLE
Since 2017, we have painted 101 murals, opened a downtown coworking space, launched the Artwalk – a monthly public arts festival and created a cultural tourism destination in Water Lane that is now listed on Tripadvisor. This street art pathway connects the Institute of Jamaica museums on East Street with the National Gallery of Jamaica on Orange Street, and the talent of these artists has brought many visitors into this part of the city.
Our main partners in these developments are the Tourism Enhancement Fund, Sherwin Williams, the KSAMC, the Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ), the CB Facey Foundation, and the Kingston Restoration Company, but it is important to note that none of this would have started without the time and money contributed by ordinary Jamaicans, both here and in the diaspora.
Ours is a vision of ‘people and place’ and with partners including IDB Lab, DBJ, PIOJ, JAMPRO, HEART and Sagicor we invest heavily in developing creative people. We have delivered over 5,500 free training opportunities, enabled nine artists to go overseas on travel grants, developed an ecommerce platform called Kulcha Connect, developed an online directory of creatives called Caribbean Creative Network where the world can now find over 409 creatives – and hire them. We have hosted four editions of Best Pitch forward, the first pitch competition exclusively for Jamaican creatives where $2.2 million in seed capital has been granted to creative entrepreneurs.