SCCA-Ljubljana

Artservis: mission, editorial concept and usage

Since 2001, Artservis has been operating on the Internet at www.artservis.org. In eight years it has become an essential website for artists, theorists, and cultural managers in Slovenia and a referential source of information internationally. Together with the other service activities of SCCA-Ljubljana it creates a well-rounded information and consulting support system for the arts and culture.
The basic mission of Artservis is to provide information and guidance. By publishing grant deadlines, competitions, calls and invitations for co-operation, financing possibilities and advice for various occupations from the world of arts, Artservis offers free help to everyone who works in the field of arts and culture. With its activities, it fulfils a gap in the communication of information, advice and exchange of experiences. In addition it is an indispensable initiator and partner in the efforts to improve conditions in culture and the position of all self-employed or free-lancers working in culture.
Artservis operates on the following principles: free public access, professionalism, objectivity, credibility, timeliness, a solid exchange of information, an understandable of information. Since 2004 the contents of Artservis have been published under the Creative Commons license.
Artservis is one of the first cultural portals in the region of Eastern Europe and has established itself as a significant and reliable source for related international cultural portals. From 2008, it is a founding member of the network of cultural portals inSEEcp.

Service, information and consulting contents of Artservis

The comprehensive database contains approximately 1000 entries and 2000 selected website links. We receive up-to-date information from around the world with the help of local and international sources such as related Internet media, partner organisations, producers and organisers of events, as well as Artservis users and subscribers. Before being published, each bit of information is confirmed and adapted to our editorial standards. The majority of users are from Slovenia, the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Central and Eastern Europe and the USA. The Artservis Newsletter currently updates 6053 subscribers each week about the latest additions to the Artservis database.

The Artservis Manual offers articles with practical instructions for users from the arts and culture. It informs and advises anyone in the field of arts who meets with different types of challenges, such as working status, legal, tax, and organisational issues. An online legal consulting centre, intended for both independent organisations as well as self-employed cultural workers and individuals, operates within the frame of the Manual. Our users can obtain free legal advice in relation to work, rights and responsibilities from the fields of legal status, working, copyright, civil and other areas.

In addition, a Forum operates within Artservis which enables the exchange of opinions and experiences of users from the field of culture. A speciality of Artservis is Poll, survey on users' opinion related to the current cultural-political issues.

Artservis artistic project: Collection

In 2005 Artservis expanded its activities from the field of informing and consulting to the promotion of creativity. Artservis' Collection is a thematic project on production conditions in culture. The Collection includes artworks that refer in a critical, analytical, witty, personal or any other manner to the conditions of creation, presentation, marketing and survival with culture and within culture - to those aspects of artistic creation that usually remain concealed. More about the Artservis Collection can be found at www.zbirka.artservis.org/eng/ (in Slovenian and English).

Artservis accomplishments for improving production conditions in culture

Artservis is actively engaged in improving production conditions of all who work in culture and the arts. Between 2001-2004 Artservis focused on the free of charge flow of information, supported the operation of alternative and autonomous spaces for arts and culture (for example AKC Metelkova mesto, Tovarna Rog, Pekarna). In 2004, in collaboration with the Culture Contact Point of Slovenia, Artservis organised an international conference on the theme of encouraging free information exchange such as basic rights and the means for stimulating cultural collaboration and artistic production in Europe and on the wider European level. In Ljubljana we hosted related electronic media and portals from the Netherlands (www.sica.nl and www.transartists.nl) and Belgium (www.on-the-move.org).

From 2004, our efforts expanded in the direction of improved online capacities and larger support for self-employed cultural workers. In 2005, we revised the Artservis Manual and in 2006, we introduced Free Legal Support, which facilitates free legal advice in relation to work, rights and obligations for Artservis users from the field of culture. In 2006, we began to focus on building awareness about the issues facing cultural workers and commenting on the changes in cultural laws and policies.

The year 2007 was a critical point for Artservis because we were left without the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. Despite this, we organised a workshop about the problems of self-employed artists (with the title Because Art can also be a Job and a Profession) in which European Parliament member Claire Gibault, the author of The Report on the Social Status of Artists,also participated.

In 2008, Artservis was once again denied funding from the Ministry of Culture, therefore we informed the media and wider public about our troubles with financing and discussed the need for an electronic medium intended to serve, inform and advise cultural workers. A group of supporters self-initiated the action BANG - Break Artservis, no go! (literally in Slovenian, It won't work without Artservis!). Because of the lack of funding, we temporarily stopped our free legal support service.

In 2009, Artservis was especially all the more active. We received funding from the Ministry of Culture and re-instated the services for free legal support. In October we organised a roundtable about self-organising of arts for improving their position, upon which four representative organisations (Odprta zbornica za vizualno umetnost, Asociacija, SUKI and Artservis) presented together for the first time, as well as guests from Serbia and Croatia. At the Ministry of Culture a project group for improving the position of self-employed in culture, in which Artservis also participates.