The Screen Machine: one of the stories
I’m not going to rehearse the complicated process which led to Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Creative Scotland deciding to cease funding an agency which they had supported, and contracted services from, for 23 years. That’s a story for another time. I’m concerned here with the issue of public record and collective memory.
Although both HIE and Creative Scotland agreed to provide a final tranche of funding to enable HI-Arts to be wound up in an orderly fashion, the fate of our archive was not on their agenda. Both bodies, rightly, wanted to ensure that projects were completed or transferred, that time could be made to try to relocate staff or assist them to find other jobs, and that these two public agencies would have access to any material needed to satisfy future audit requirements. But no officers of either body ever expressed any interest in our deeper history. If I hadn’t approached the Highland Archive Centre, and if the staff there hadn’t been so welcoming and supportive, our files would almost certainly have been pulped.
Although I’ve spent my entire career in the arts, history was my first love and I went to university fully intending to become an art historian. It didn’t quite work out that way, but I’ve never lost the historian’s instincts. I could tell early on that HI-Arts was working at an interesting time and so I aimed from the outset to keep a full and ordered record of our activities. After all, in just the first decade of HI-Arts’s existence, Highlands and Islands Enterprise came into being, the Scottish Arts Charter was published, the National Lottery was introduced, local government was reorganised, and the Scottish Parliament was reconvened, all of which had a huge impact on the culture of the Highlands and Islands.
So, through our records, future students of history can trace the development of professional theatre in the region, production by production and tour by tour, through the funding that was devolved to HI-Arts by HIE and SAC. They can follow the troubled and ultimately triumphant creation of the UK’s only mobile cinema, the Screen Machine. They’ll see how our music industry development programme led to the setting up of the annual creative industry showcase festival, Go North, and ultimately to the emergence of festivals such as Rock Ness, Belladrum and Loopallu, and to the success of Inverness’s music venue, The Ironworks, run by former HI-Arts staff. And they’ll see how that music programme became a template for similar long-term development programmes in crafts, writing and fashion, now fortunately continuing under the banner of a new organisation, emergents.
But there’s another form of record that isn’t in the Highland archives, because it’s online. I had been concerned that so much of what happened in the arts in the Highlands and Islands was off the radar of Central Belt media, and left no lasting record. So, in 2003 we established Northings.com as an online arts magazine. In the subsequent decade Northings built up an archive of over 700 features and some 1,300 reviews, all of a length and detail that would have been inconceivable in a print equivalent, and was getting around 500 unique visitors a day.
Just as with our paper archive, neither HIE nor Creative Scotland has expressed any interest in the future of this online archive, even though HIE funded Northings for its entire lifetime, and Creative Scotland, or the SAC before it, funded most of the activities that Northings documents. We managed to find enough funds to enable Northings to be hosted, and remain fully accessible online, until March 2014, but if another host isn’t found by then, that unique record will be lost.
Back in 1993, SAC funding to the Highlands and Islands was, per capita, half what it was in the rest of Scotland. I was appointed by HIE to implement a strategy to remedy that imbalance. By 2007, when the Scottish Arts Council set up their core group of 50-odd ‘Foundation Clients’, a quarter of those foundation organisations were based in the Highlands and Islands; there were (and are) none south of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
That extraordinary turn around was due to sustained and often visionary investment by Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and it has had a transformational impact on the culture of the area, an impact that, oddly, today’s HIE seems to have difficulty in recognising, perhaps because the agency has never properly assessed it. After all, the last comprehensive evaluation of the work of HI-Arts was commissioned by HIE in 1999.
Robert Livingston was the director of HI-Arts
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