I wasn’t going to post about this event, mainly due to the fact that it wasn’t very interesting. A debate about why we should care about creativity in the West Midlands, you would have thought, might include discussion about the region, the towns, the cities… Or then again, maybe you would expect a Birmingham centric discussion and how it compares to other cities…well, London anyway.
Maybe the title was somewhat misleading. I gathered that by “creativity” they meant the creative industries, because creativity to me, stretches beyond art. I don’t think the debate would have focussed on the creative identity of the West Midlands because I’m not sure anybody knows what it is.
Maybe the debate could have been a chance to explore the regional differences / parallels and find out about projects and ideas that are happening. Discover common ground and perhaps gather new ideas, all the time building an idea of a creative West Midlands identity. If that happened then maybe we would start to realise what we have regionally, celebrate it, nurture it and stop trying to be something else.
While I live in Birmingham, I was born in Wolverhampton and spent most of life growing up in Walsall so I think of myself as from the West Midlands. There is plenty of grassroots creative / artistic stuff going on that documents life in the region (and as a photographer, I like to include myself in that bracket). Maybe all this creativity is being debated and monitored, reviewed and documented….. Maybe it isn’t, I don’t know. but last nights debate didn’t do what it said on the tin.
I didn’t go, so have no opinion on the event. However, I am curious about creative stuff away from the urban hub(bub). I’m thinking of places like the River Tame where it winds under the motorway, or on the old factory sites near Great Bridge, Tat Bank, Pensnett, etc and wondering if anything aside from burned cars and graffiti happen in those places. I’ve occasionally come across a den or other bit of creative play, and wondered how much more there is, tucked away. Surely there must be the occasional act of artfulness. (I am not thinking of the decorated sheds across from Walsall College, beautiful as they are.) Would you be documenting that sort of thing?
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