We need care-filled, human-centred, long-term infrastructures for the arts

By Siana Bangura, April 2025

Imagine a world where there are no more artists.

There’s no more music, theatre, film, TV, dance, visual art, photography, poetry, novels, stories of any kind brought to life for you to enjoy.

There’s no more fashion, no more pottery, furniture, design, no more beautiful things.

Imagine the artists have disappeared.

Some have finally pivoted and got ‘real jobs’ as we’re always told to do.

Some have disappeared entirely.

Imagine that?

As a practising artist myself, with a broad body of storytelling work, this imagined dystopian reality doesn’t feel as distant to me as it may seem to others. All the artists and creatives I know are tired, including me. The arts, as a sector in Britain, is facing a landscape marked by declining funding, reduced participation in arts education, and a growing gap between what artists earn and the UK median. A significant portion of the creative industries’ workforce, including artists and arts workers, are freelance or self-employed. While the overall self-employment rate in the UK is around 16%, it is significantly higher within the creative sector, reaching up to roughly 32%. This figure is as high as 70% for visual artists.

The State of the Arts report, published in July 2024 by Campaign for the Arts & University of Warwick, found that the UK has one of the lowest levels of government spending on arts and culture among European countries, slashing its total culture budget by 6%. Meanwhile, countries like Germany, France, and Finland have increased their spending by up to 70%. 

These cuts and the lack of long-term investment in artists and arts institutions threatens the sustainability of the sector overall.

To kick off Marmalade Festival 2025 at Oxford’s Old Fire Station, I facilitated a timely conversation between representatives sitting in different cross-sections of the arts ecosystem.

In conversation, we had:

●     Rafia Hussain, Founder of Rafia Hussain Productions

●     David Jubb, Co-Director of Citizens In Power

●     Jo McLean, Director of People United

●     Louisa Hrabowy, UK Lead - Access to Culture, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

And we were all convened by the wonderful Clara Vaughan, CEO of Oxford’s Old Fire Station.

Last year I had several conversations with Clara about my own upset with the old world power structures of the arts - ironically a space supposedly for freedom and dreaming up new worlds - and the entrenched hierarchical, patriarchal governances of its institutions.

Not only am I a creative practitioner, working across theatre, film, and events, I’m also a systems change practitioner, busy experimenting with fellow disruptors out in the field, exploring the world of Transformational Governance. The central question of my practice across the board is how do we shift power from a concentrated centre, held by a minority, towards where it really needs to be - shared amongst the currently marganlised and minoritised.

Together, Rafia, David, Jo, Louisa and I confronted the question of ‘who’s in charge of the arts?’ and, by extension, ‘what do infrastructures of care look like?’ in theory and, most importantly, practice.

Rafia shared her experience as a freelance producer from a Global Majority, working class background, originally from Rochdale (and since returned) but spending the last few years in the East Midlands deepening her practice. In 2024 she co-authored the Producing Producers report - the culmination of a two year nationally significant research project to shape arts policy and develop the infrastructure for the training and development of racialised producers. As a producer myself, I welcome research like this which puts a spotlight on those of us who are the ‘builders’ of the arts ecosystem, enabling the conditions for the creation of the work we love. Rafia is now busy building her production company, Rafia Hussain Productions, aiming to be an incubator and champion of Black and Brown theatre.

David gave us an insight into the work he’s doing at Citizens in Power, alongside co-director Saad Eddine-Said, applying his decades of experience as an arts leader to the question of civic power. In this era of his work, David and his collaborators are focused on co-designing ways for citizens to lead decision-making and shape the future through citizen-led governance. Hearing about the different possibilities for participatory governance and sharing power lit up the imaginations of all in the room, reminding us of the need for stretching our capacity to dream and vision, in order to tackle the many challenges we are facing.

Jo offered us practical advice and examples from the rich work being done at People United, an arts organisation committed to championing the movement of arts and creativity to elicit and support positive health and wellbeing, create deeper social connections, and encourage experimentation. They apply tools such as Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem Map to their work to help people understand the roles they play; they have developed a care-centred methodology and recognise the importance of our interdependence; and they remunerate all they work with to remove, or reduce, a critical barrier to engagement for those taking part in their projects. Their work is underpinned by research examining the role which creativity can play in increasing empathy and compassion in our lives.

And finally, Louisa shared perspectives from the funding landscape, noting that work to make arts funding more sustainable was ongoing. The Gulbenkian Foundation are an example of a funder committed to more intentional, long-term partnerships, supporting the organisations they fund to influence change across the system. They intend to support the projects and initiatives they fund to live on beyond the funding period, continuing to benefit relevant communities.

I asked if, in many ways, the answer to the question of who is in charge of the arts was funders. As dismaying as this is, there’s truth to this sentiment. Over the last few years I’ve been working with select funders interrogating their governance, and ways the relationship between funders and fundees can transform from paternal to partnership. Money is power and therefore funders have the power. Myself and other artists and creative practitioners are  feeling the lack of long-term investment in artists and their projects. We still find ourselves stuck in loops of short-term funding for 3months, 6months, a year if you’re lucky, rather than being able to engage with a funding partner and organisation or institution for several years.

These short-term offers of ‘support’ then leave you hanging off a cliff once the period of engagement has ended, wondering ‘what happens next?’ and ‘what am I supposed to do now?’. In some ways, this feels worse than never having a tase of the support in the first place. Artists keep being asked what they need - something I spoke about with Rafia - and it feels like we’ve made it known time and time again. We need material investment in our practice, as well as supportive infrastructures because what we do is a real profession. Creative practitioners are members of this country’s workforce, and we are keen to pay any support we get forward, but first the support has to exist.

As well as passionate conversation as a panel, we got interactive with our community and were challenged during the Q&A with questions about the future of AI and the arts; debate vs deliberation; mass mobilisation of artists; whether all our creativity needs to be commodified for it to be valid in the first place; building cultures of care and longevity; and an extremely important provocation around the difference between hope and ‘radical hope’, care and ‘radical care’. This latter conversation was particularly profound, especially because soon after this event, I attended my friend, Busayo Twins’ TEDx Talk in Brighton in which she challenged all our ideas about hope. She was rightfully and poetically critical of our tendancy towards simply hoping, and thinking that’s enough. For me, my radical hope looks like hoping and acting, even when it’s hard - especially when it’s hard. My radical care looks like caring and taking action, even when the odds are stacked against us - especially when the odds are stacked against us. And when we sat down to converse with each other in community circles, in the conversation taking place at my table we were reminded of the linguistic roots of the word ‘radical’. It derives from a Latin word meaning ‘roots’. Because roots are the deepest part of a plant, it is fitting that radical, when unobscured by negative uses in modern parlance, describes what is fundamental and essential. In the words of Angela Davis, ‘radical simply means grasping things at the root’.

When I think of systems change, I think of exactly this - grasping at the root and tending to the root-causes of an issue, rather than placing band-aids on issues and letting wounds rot and fester.

Imagine what more models of sustained support could enable and birth? When artists have stability and know their basic needs are met, we are able to create from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. Sure, a lot of breathtaking work has been created from the stereotypical pits of artistic struggle, but what if we shift away from those models of martyrdom? What if we promote healthy models for artistic life, held in care-filled containers?

That version of life feels distant at the moment, but having spaces like the Marmalde festival to really chew on these ideas, imagine together, and come to solutions is an absolutely vital step in the right direction.

I wish a care-filled life, with the support people need, not just for artists, but for all of us.

Perhaps by the time next year’s festival rolls round, we’ll be a little closer to a landscape in which artists can thrive and keep making the beautiful stuff the world needs now more than ever.

Siana Bangura [pronounced ‘see-anna’] (she/her) is a multi-award winning writer, producer, performer, community organiser and root-causes systems change facilitator and coach, hailing from South East London, currently living, working, and creating between London and the West Midlands.

Siana is the founder and former editor of the Black British Feminist platform, No Fly on the WALL; she is the author of the critically acclaimed debut collection, ‘Elephant’, a book of poetry meditating on Black British womanhood and life growing up in London; the producer of ‘1500 & Counting’, a documentary film investigating deaths in custody and police brutality in the UK; the founder of Courageous Films, a social-justice focused documentary production house; and Producer at Siana Bangura Productions, a creative studio focusing on curating work, events and multi-layered experiences across the arts with care and intention.

As a playwright, Siana’s recent works include the play ‘Swim, Aunty, Swim!’, which was named Best New Play at the UK Theatre Awards and recognised at the Black British Theatre Awards 2024.

A multi-disciplinary leader, Siana works and campaigns on issues of race, class, and gender and their intersections and is currently working on projects focusing on climate justice, the arms trade, Tech Justice, and state violence.

With a special interest in group dynamics in non-traditional structures, non-hierarchies, and decentralised networks, Siana was a campaigner at Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), and is currently a member of the Transformational Governance Stewarding Group, facilitating experiments in meaningfully and intentionally transitioning from traditional to liberatory and life-affirming ways of working. She is also formerly a producer at Catalyst, where she co-created networks & ecosystems, and continues to network weave as a freelancer out in the field, taking a root-causes systems change approach to all her work, and being firmly grounded in Black Feminist Praxis.

With experience in indie publishing, journalism, comms and campaigns under her belt, Siana’s mission across her vast portfolio of work is to help move voices and experiences traditionally marginalised, from the margins, to the centre, and encourage shifts from passive forms of ‘allyship’ to more active forms of comradeship.

More at: www.sianabangura.com