Change as the Only Constant

Annemarie Türk

In 1992, when I joined KulturKontakt Austria, it was still a very small, very young organisation – but it had all the possibilities it needed to develop and build new things.

Back then, we had no experiences in mediation between business and art at our disposal and we were entering uncharted territory in devising forms of cultural cooperation with the new democracies in Eastern and South Eastern Europe.
In the beginning we were confronted, above all, with numerous open questions – for example, how to bring together businesses and artists for their mutual benefit, or what kinds of support programmes would be best suited to initiate and intensify cultural dialogue with our Eastern neighbours. We wanted to base our activities not on some grand, generous gesture but on an earnest endeavour to meet our neighbours on an equal basis and form new partnerships.
We constantly had to deal with new and unknown factors and were sometimes overwhelmed by the swift and highly diverse changes we encountered. In spite of all this, KulturKontakt Austria’s work was not so much an adventure as an intensive learning process that was more exciting than anything one could image.

Sometimes our enthusiasm was dampened by the fact that in the early years it was shared by very few people outside the organisation, while most of the media paid hardly any attention to our work. But memorable encounters with people and cultures helped us to forget our disappointment.
One thing soon became clear: the only constant in our work was going to be change.
The social and political developments in the region as well as in Austria led to new areas of activity and new focuses. In order to meet the needs of artists here as well as in Eastern and South Eastern Europe, we rethought our programmes more than once.
We decided that merely reacting to change was not enough, and so we tried to generate impulses wherever we saw a deficit. Persistence in our commitment to the promotion of young, unknown artists was and is a part of our mission, even though working with well-known artists would have been easier and would have spared us many a discussion and justification.

KulturKontakt Austria was thus a learning institution – long before this became a catchphrase – and it will, I sincerely hope, retain its capacity to learn in the coming 20 years as well. KulturKontakt Austria has never been an organisation to rest on its laurels, and the courage to be open to change will also accompany us in our new tasks and fields of endeavour such as migration, intercultural dialogue and cultural education: in all our spheres of activity.