On You Are Here
As an organisation, You Are Here doesn’t tend to assertively promote what we do behind the scenes. Usually, we only market and promote on behalf of our artists and the festival we run to showcase those artists. It makes sense that many of you might assume that producing those events is all we do, and we’ve never thought of that as a problem per se.
That said, we’ve recently had cause to realise that, after nearly ten years of operation, what we do isn’t necessarily well known to audiences, communities and supporters. So starting from now, we’re going to make more effort to present You Are Here to the public – who we are, why we are, and what we can help you with!
You Are Here is:
- An Artist and Producer Development Organisation.
That means that we help Canberra artists to develop their artistic practice, skills, relationships, values, audiences and opportunities. We work with artists from all artforms who are engaged with some form of experimentation. We also work with emerging creative producers, and train them in You Are Here’s unique model of producer engagement.
- An Artist’s Residency.
Our core activity is an 8-month program called Cahoots. We select a diverse group of Canberra artists and/or producers (8 per year), and create a bespoke development experience for each of them. We identify a way to measure the development of their practice in a way that makes sense for them, and then we work alongside them to make sure that development happens. Cahoots artists are selected through an open public callout at the start of each year.
- A Critical Community of Artists.
Canberra artists have told us the thing they want the most is to be part of an artistic community that is supportive, critically engaged, and intellectually rigorous. A place where their own artistic practice is forced to develop against a high standard, where they feel safe to experiment and take creative risks. Cahoots aims to model this kind of environment on a small scale, so that it can be ultimately achieved in the Canberra arts community as a whole.
- A Values-Driven Organisation.
You Are Here has a strong set of guiding principles that drives what we do, what we won’t do and where to focus our efforts. These are driven by our primary values – accessibility and inclusion for artists and audiences, relationship-building as the core of best practice, and experimentation as an essential societal and artistic need. Any working model we create for artists and audiences is based around these values.
- A Festival.
The secondary activity of You Are Here is to connect experimental artists with audiences. We produce an annual festival of artworks that represent the shared ideas and values of our Cahoots artists and the creative communities that they are a part of. This year, festival activity will take place over the last three weekends of September. We will be exclusively presenting work that is in development by Cahoots artists and their collaborators.
- A Peak Body for Experimental and Innovative Arts in the ACT.
Across ten years of operation we have developed unique expertise in the areas of artistic production and innovation, across all artforms. Our models for connecting general and specific audiences to innovative and exciting arts activity are the equal of any in Australia. Our staff and board are experts in the many nuanced details and mechanics that make up high quality arts production.
What is our hope for sharing all this? We hope that if you’re someone who is trying to contribute to the arts in Canberra, be it as an artist, an arts worker, an arts policy maker or a member of a creative community, that you would hit us up for a coffee (in person or over Zoom) and pick our brains about what you’re trying to do. In the meantime, we’ll be putting ourselves out there a little bit more, so don’t hesitate to approach us by email with questions, ideas, projects, or your own perspective on anything we’ve said here.