Neu! Reekie! Present The New Now!
Kevin Williamson, one of Neu! Reekie!’s co-founders discusses their recent Creative Scotland funding for The New Now!
These are the best of times and the worst of times, wrote Dickens, of an age of great uncertainty and upheaval. Who among us can’t feel the ground moving beneath our feet, a great change in the air. I know I do and I think every artist and writer senses that we’ve moved into a new era defined by both anxiety and a will for change.
An arts project like the one we’re embarking on now with Neu! Reekie! is underpinned by overlapping existential crises; all triggered by humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with the natural world. An ongoing global pandemic has changed the way we interact with each other, and this overlaps with an age of species extinction, global warming, increasingly extreme weather patterns, and an unforgiving build of carbon in the atmosphere.
I feel we’ve been thrown down a gauntlet — as artists, poets, writers, film makers, performers and musicians — to react to these unprecedented times. How we engage with all of this, these are the things that will define this new project we’ve begun. This project is not like any other we’ve done before. My role and ours as arts events organisers is to inspire and challenge, to show what is possible, to alter perceptions, to make connections through the arts, to help build resilience and community; articulate and reflect the world as it is, through the art we make.
It’s good to know that Creative Scotland have had the foresight to encourage and fund projects like ours that wont look away, that will engage with the overlapping existential crises that are currently engulfing humanity. We accept the challenge. Through art, and the events we put on, I hope we can do justice to all of the arts which demand to be heard, seen and experienced.
