The Chilean Ministry of Culture invited me as an international delegate to MicSur – the leading Culture Industries Expo and Conference in the South American continent. Its first edition launched in Argentina in 2014 and takes place every two years with a different member country hosting it.
MicSur is a space for the cultural industries from countries around South America to join together to promote the exchange of their products and services, its participating member countries are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.
Programmers, artists, companies, producers, and organisations attend MicSur to learn from each other, share, and develop partnerships and collaborations through meetings, panels, seminars and showcases. The experiences of MicSur help to consolidate a cultural ecosystem that transcends borders and ensures local and national cultural markets can expand across the continent and the rest of the world.
The work Luma Creations is doing has allowed the organisation to reach a much wider audience where we can connect and develop relationships and partnerships that enables us to become international without losing our strong local connections.
MicSur took place in the Museum of Fine Arts in the centre of Santiago as well as several arts centres. The conference was launched on Wednesday 17th of April by Gabriel Boric, the president of Chile, at The Museum of Contemporary Arts. Between Thursday 18th to Saturday 20th April was a period of intense one-to-one meetings, talks and panels, on a breadth of subjects within the cultural industries across South America.
I participated in more than 40 meetings with artists, production companies, cultural organisations and representatives of Chile’s three UNESCO Music Cities (Concepcion, Frutillar, and Valparaiso). During some of these meetings I met musicians, actors, dancers, circus artists, carnavalists, puppeteers, acrobats, producers and cultural activists. It was a truly intense and wonderful experience to meet so many amazing creatives from Latin America with whom I would never have been able to connect, if not for this event and the invitation from the Ministry of Culture.
Now I am in the process of continuing these conversations and I am confident, as an organisation, Luma Creations will work with many of the people I meet in the future.
I also attended several of the showcases and was blown away by some of the productions. I am already looking at ways of bringing some to Liverpool, as I believe the public will be as enthralled by them as I was.
Mic Sur has been extremely valuable for Luma Creations and all participating artists and organisations in attendance, providing a platform for participants to network internationally and cultivating exciting new projects and partnerships, of which I look forward to sharing, seeing, and experiencing in the near future.
By Francisco Carrasco
