Ale kommun

I left TILLT after 40 years to work as the Enterprise Manager in Ale municipality, 10 minutes outside Gothenburg city. Gothenburg is on the west coast of Sweden. The reason for that is that I found quite an exciting possibility to instead of selling artistic interventions to companies; I now have a mandate to develop the corporate sector in the Municipality. With my background, I know how art can transform organisations, private and public organisations. That has been expressed during the recruitment process, so they know what kind of figure they got for the position.

It’s important, working with these things, that I also need to change perspectives. If I demand that companies and artists change perspectives, I also need to change perspectives. Now I have a new perspective to be able, to try to push the development in an area, to be more innovative and more open to the new economy. Of course, with my background, I want to use artistic thinking to get there. Because the larger cities have quite high rents, it’s quite expensive to live in these areas, and sometimes the larger cities have very long decision processes, and therefore smaller municipalities from that to be quite rapid and act upon issues and suggestions quite fast, and I see this possibility in Ale municipality.

The rents are quite low, so we could easily get a gentrification process going in this area. We could have a lot of artistic workshops, and get the creative industries to work very closely…I mean artists that are living in Gothenburg, training in Gothenburg, could even start moving to the outskirts since the communications are really strong. They could transform old industries and empty spaces into what is needed for the future. I want to see Ale as a test bed for how can we develop a municipality with other kinds of approaches to innovation capacity through artistic thinking. That is my dream—to do this in the coming years.

CultureFighter

Pia Areblad

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