It’s never easy to step outside your comfort zone. It means embracing your weaknesses and exposing your vulnerabilities, focusing as much on what you don’t know as what you do. Yet for an artist or a creative organisation, stepping outside their comfort zone by working with new international partners is an essential part of their growth and development. It might expose their vulnerabilities: but it also exposes them to new ideas, new approaches, new creative practices, and new markets too – new audiences for their work. Best of all, it allows them to make new friends and form international relationships that can blossom into lifelong partnerships, and evolve in unexpected directions.
Come Together tells a series of stories about artists and creative organisations who have done just that. The UK and Indonesia are both fantastically creative and diverse countries, but they have had little history of real cultural exchange. Since early 2016, a new generation of creative practitioners have set about COME TOGETHER changing that, forming a new generation of partnerships: fuelled by creativity, technology and diversity, and channeling the youthful spirit of both countries. Already that new generation of creative partnerships is starting to yield a rich harvest of fresh artistic ideas, stories that show what the people of the UK and Indonesia can achieve when they come together, none of which could have been achieved by either country on its own. And this is just the start. As word gets around, as more artists and audiences make connections, as the network grows from hundreds into thousands, there’s unlimited potential for the people of our two friendly island nations to step outside their comfort zones: to learn from one another, to share stories and to exchange imaginations. We highlighted 18 amazing stories from the campaign and can now be accessed through the link below!