RIOT SLIGO – Conversations with Remarkable People – Consultant

The aim of Culture 2025, The National Culture Policy, is “to put culture at the heart of our lives and develop a more collaborative approach across all sectors”. And so RIOT:Sligo has brought together Leading Thinkers and Practitioners in Economics, Planning, Arts, Community, Creative Industries, Finance and Funding, Community Wealth Building, Architecture, Climate, Identity, Policy Collaboration and more to do just that. To think about ReImagining Our Town (RIOT), to share ideas, experience and stories and see what recommendations emerge when everybody is invited to the culture conversation. Register HERE now for 23rd and 24th March and join the Conversations

For me the best part of every conference I’ve attended has been the conversations with remarkable people. Whether evesdropping on groups of people during the endless coffee breaks, or having strangers change the way I think with a personal story or a well honed question, it is the conversations – over coffee and cake, at the bar, or in whispered tones at the back of the auditorium – that test our ideas and expand our imaginations. It is in conversation that we get to make meaning together. So when I got the chance to work on RIOT:SLIGO I knew that conversation had to be at the heart of it.

Conversation can be messy, difficult, challenging and – at its best – democratic, creative and visionary. A good conversation is the art of improvisation at its best: listening, accepting, questioning and endlessly creative. And when we’re dealing with complex problems and ideas we we need to be able to work with many people and multiple viewpoints – we need to be able to improvise.

And culture is a complex companion: it is who we are, what we do and how we do it all at the same time. So what does it mean to ReImagine a place, any place, when culture is both the decisions we make and the way we make those decisions? How do we manage something that is product and process at the same time? And what is the real tangible benefit for people when the ReImagining is complete.

I don’t think any one person has the answer to this – and this why we have conversations, and this is why everybody has to be at the table, so check out the range of experience and perspective we’ve gathered together for this event:

Professor Arjo Klamer, Helen Marriage, Cliff Hague, Lorraine Maher, Claudia Zeiske, Joost Heinsuis, Mabel Chah, Jens Thomas Ivarson, Vaimoana Niumeitolu, Neil McInroy, Una Mannion, Professor Stephen Kinsella, Rosella Tarantino, Mark O’Brien, Hannah Dobson, Niamh NicGabhann, Diarmaid Lawlor, Gillian Ni Chaiside, Shane Loughlin, Bernie Butler, Nathalie Weadick, Frank Moylan, Laoura Ntziourou, Kris Manulak