I love writing to the sounds of Simeon Ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato. The music seems to put my brain into just the right frequency to think and let my thoughts flow more freely (I am sure there is a scientific explanation for this). I am writing this little note while already on the train traveling to my hometown in Northern Germany where our summer vacation will start. It’s a long trip and I can listen to this recording of Canto Ostinato even a few times while I work away on some of the most urgent priorities before closing my laptop.  

 

It’s not quite time for the holidays yet, because so much has happened recently. Just last week, we announced that ELIA’s Leadership Symposium in Manchester is already at full capacity and sold out. It’s exciting to know that we will have such a solid group of participants with us at Manchester Metropolitan University, working together on the Manchester Provocation. For those who are unable to register anymore, the good news is that we have two really strong events on offer this fall that you might also find interesting:  Creative Skills Week from 10-13 October 2023 at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and Futures (Un)Known, the final conference of the FAST45 project which brought the sector together in imagining the art school in 2045. This takes place on 6-7 December 2023 in Brussels. So, if you are disappointed not to be able to come to Manchester, I invite you warmly to Vienna and Brussels where we will continue these important conversations. Want to host an ELIA event yourself? We have three calls out at the moment for hosting in-presence ELIA events in 2024 and 2025, you can find more information in this newsletter.  

 

The ELIA team will be taking some leave during the summer. As is our tradition, we celebrated summer with our ‘Fun Day’ earlier this month, visiting the great city of Rotterdam for some speed boat sightseeing of the harbour, an amazing lunch at a local community centre (Syrian cuisine!), and a walk through Rotterdam Zuid discovering the situatedness of one of our European projects. Taking a deep breath with each other after a lot of hard work – I extend a big thank you to the amazing ELIA Team!  

For me, the best part of this day was our visit to our Conference Manager Janja Škerget - who had just given birth to a beautiful little girl. Many of you will know Janja, and we congratulate her and her husband! 

 

My suitcase contains a swimsuit and hiking boots and that’s what will be my top priority in the coming weeks, as well as some of the books I downloaded onto my e-reader from the ELIA Summer Reading List which so many of our board members contributed to.  

I wish all of the readers of the ELIA Newsletter a restful summer, see you again very soon!