by Tracy Shaw, Loca Creatives Director
So here goes... A very warm welcome to our blog, our new website and - especially if you've not met us before - to Loca Creatives, a full eight months old this week. Goodness knows where the time's gone - disappeared in a flurry of mundane but necessary start-up tasks, getting feet adjusted to unfamiliar ground, putting systems in place, making connections, seeding new projects, cracking on with current ones (about which more later, in posts not just by me but by some of the brilliantly talented artist-practitioners who I'm proud and delighted to have on board as colleagues and close collaborators).
Inevitably it's been a time for a great deal of thinking too, not least about the nature and focus of the new company's work and about how to re-frame things for changed circumstances whilst staying true to old roots that still feel perfectly relevant and valid. (The roots - as you'll know if you're aware of our background or have already browsed the website - are in a body of work that grew up over fourteen years within a local authority environment that was for the most part very conducive and enabling, allowing a small, 'semi-detached' team of five to sustain itself way beyond its original three-year funding term and to punch well above its weight in 'putting art at the heart of local regeneration'.) The process of developing the website especially has entailed a good deal of grappling with concepts, language and ways of articulating what Loca Creatives is about to a whole range of new and further-flung audiences.
In my wrestlings with language, marketing blurbs and key messages over the past months, a quandary about continuing to use the word 'regeneration' has surfaced time and again, and with it the difficulty of coming up with a new vocabulary to describe the work Loca Creatives does, the values and purposes behind the work, and the contexts in which we aim to do it. I'm starting up a shiny, fresh-faced, independent company that aspires to be innovative and forward-looking, in times when many folk would argue that local regeneration - which was fully the context for the genesis of Loca and the growth of our work in Kirklees - has had its day, become an unaffordable and untenable field of practice, lost its currency as a political and social concept. Many people and organisations whose work was entirely dedicated to the regeneration of towns, cities, neighbourhoods and/or communities have disappeared from the field, or at best have had to re-align and redefine themselves. So does continuing to use the 'R' word to talk about the company's work risk signalling that we're out of step, stuck nostalgically in some long-gone neighbourhood renewal/local regeneration hey-day having failed to feel the seismic shifts and tune in to what's been going on in the world around us?
As a flit around our other web pages will tell you, I think I've found my answers - certainly enough to keep me and Loca Creatives happily reconciled with the 'R' word for a while yet (at least until the next bout of healthy navel-gazing comes around). So - unapologetically, self-consciously, loudly, proudly - Using Creativity As A Tool Within Regeneration is what we do. It may not be all of what we do or the only way of talking about what we do but it's definitely a big part, a strong root that still holds good and is putting out new shoots, just in time for spring. I can't claim any original thinking here and I certainly need to pay credit to the inspirational thinking and writing from which my own flash of clarity came - but you'll have to read the next post to find out whodunnit.
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