Annual overview CBK Rotterdam 2022

The annual overview of 2022 looks back at all our activities and activities of the past year. The document is here to view and/or download. 

Art: a free exchange of ideas – sometimes deepening, sometimes enriching, sometimes abrasive

What a year is behind us, I wrote last year, looking back at 2021. With equal right I can now write the following: What a strange year 2022 was. At first society was still firmly locked, then everything went wild. Hesitant at first, later almost without reservations. The first months always with the thought: it won't happen again - but the last few months with full breaths, corona is no more! It seems like a good time to stop relating everything to the pandemic period now, but I can't avoid it completely in this annual report. I promise, dosed.

In my opinion, as CBK Rotterdam, we have weathered the period with corona well. The most important memories are that we have created opportunities for Rotterdam artists: for example PPR via Art Office, more activities outside via BKOR/SIR and online activities via TENT (bookshop Bold!, conversations and the like). In 2022 we have moved forward again from the spring. In some cases no problem at all, artists were eager to get back to work. In other cases it was more difficult: the public did not immediately come to the activities in large numbers, as if they thought that caution was the best medicine after all. Fortunately, in the last quarter that barrier also seemed to have been broken. The following chapters discuss the activities of the various programs of CBK Rotterdam, but I also expressly refer to the appendices where all our activities are listed.

At CBK Rotterdam, it was mainly TENT that was affected by the emergency measures. But within the entire cultural sector there were disciplines that had it even harder (and still have it at the moment) than our presentation platform. It remains remarkable, of course, that in the Netherlands the entire cultural sector had to join the rear in 2021 and was therefore denied its significance for the well-being of society. The Netherlands can also be called unique in that sense.

Content development

Art is the beating heart of an open society. Art exists by the grace of a free exchange of ideas – sometimes deepening, sometimes enriching, sometimes abrasive. In all cases, art wants to offer contemporary insights and perspectives, with which people can find each other or better understand different positions. Rotterdam is an intense city with its own dynamics in which visual art has played an important role since the first day of reconstruction. CBK Rotterdam has been committed to the city for forty years by connecting makers, cultural partners, social stakeholders, residents and the public. Our activities reach into the capillaries of the entire city (from Hook of Holland to Nesselande, from Rotterdam Center to IJsselmonde) to create and maintain a climate in which art in Rotterdam can continue to develop and is relevant to everyone.

Together with makers, cultural partners, social stakeholders and residents, CBK Rotterdam is working on a lively art climate in Rotterdam. It is crucial that we are located in the middle of the city and are involved in what is going on in the city. We enable artists and thus the city to develop new work and a new language, to develop joint initiatives and thus help shape the dreamed city. We operate as a partner of residents and other stakeholders, based on their motivation, experience and involvement, to work with artists on a city in which we want to live together, a city in which imagination and versatility have an inescapable place. We do this by placing our core qualities, interaction and involvement at the center of our actions.

CBK Rotterdam realizes its mission through three programs that complement and feed each other. The relationship between art and the city is central to each of the programmes. With Art Office, we offer artists the space to develop their practice and to initiate activities together with others that allow them to contribute to the cultural and social dynamics in the city from their perspective and agenda. With BKOR/SIR we take care of the city collection in the public space, we support Rotterdammers in their request to see important histories and people in the form of a work of art in their city, and we give artists the opportunity to use the common space in the shape the city. With TENT we offer a lively stage and production house for the artists, forms of expression and subjects that the metropolitan culture of Rotterdam produces, which we connect to a national and international audience and to a much sought-after education programme.

About Lucas, director CBK Rotterdam