Kia ora Basement whānau!
We hope you’ve had a rejuvenating break with friends, family and experiences that have you feeling full, content and ready for the new year.
The Basement team are back on deck, preparing for a busy month of celebrating Pride and setting our intentions and hopes for the year ahead. During our reflections, we’ve realised that we’ve been gunning it pretty hard (without really stopping) to get ourselves and our artists through the challenges and niggles of the last three years. Covid, extreme weather events and a very vulnerable arts funding landscape have all tuckered us out a bit! Our hearts are also feeling the weight of the world, and we’re really interested in questioning how arts orgs should be functioning right now. We know that the ‘more is more’ approach isn’t necessarily going to be the right vehicle for us achieving our goals and living out our values.
So instead of ignoring this feeling and trying to carry on at a lightning and unsustainable pace, we’re going to do a little bit less this year, but with more intention. We want to be at our best for all the artists who walk through the Basement roller door, and we hope with this mind shift, we’ll be able to give 100% of ourselves every day. To do this, we’re going to press pause on a couple of our artist development programmes, and pull back on the extracurricular events. Our Matariki artist wānanga and Ideas in Residence programme will both be put on ice, just for this year. This will allow us space and time to reflect on these amazing programmes, and how they can best be placed within our future to have an even deeper impact. We really treasure them both, and providing development support to artists is super important to us. So this is just temporary! They will be back soon.
We will of course continue to present our Summer, Winter and Spring seasons of Hire-For-Nothing works, made by some of Aotearoa’s most glorious independent artists and companies. We’ve got some super exciting venue hires coming through later in the year, so keep an eye out for those! Our Producer Pals programme will still go ahead as usual, and we have a wonderful cohort of Pals on board this year (who we will be announcing soon!).
We are still going to be fiercely advocating for our independent artists in small but meaningful ways. This includes our ongoing Artists Make Auckland campaign, which we love heaps! You can expect to see a restock of our most popular items soon, and maybe even some new pieces thrown in the mix 😜
Our wee Basement squad can’t wait for another year of outstanding and brave art-making in our city. We hope that our artist communities will understand that by upholding our values of well-being and groundedness, we’ll do better to support artists thrive.
E iti noa ana, nā te aroha.
Although it is small, it is given with love.
