In 2017 the art center VIERNULVIER (formerly Vooruit) started a profound and detailed initiative to anchor horizontal working structures in their organization. With 350,000 visitors a year, VIERNULVIER is one of the most important arts centers of Flanders. Situated in the center of the Belgian city of Ghent, it offers a broad mix of cultural activities, including dance, theater, performance, literature and music.

We asked artistic coordinator Róise Goan how the artistic program develops collaboratively within this extraordinary working structure of VIERNULVIER.

Sigrid Gareis: “VIERNULVIER is not a model, however, but an attitude” is a kind of motto on your website. This indicates a clear vision that you are pursuing. Could you describe this attitude in more detail?

Róise Goan: If we are honest, I think this statement relates more clearly to the former name of our venue: Vooruit (long story: we had to react and change our name because the Flemish socialist party, with whom we share our roots, decided to change their name to Vooruit without consulting us). Vooruit means FORWARD, Allez! Let’s Go! Avanti!, and beyond the progressive surface message of forward-looking arts practice, I think Vooruit speaks to an underlying attitude in the house of ‘let’s give it a shot’. There is a very strong appetite, across the teams in our house at VIERNULVIER, to try new things, and to say yes, wherever possible. This attitude has led to a lot of innovation, happy surprises and joyful discoveries in not just the work we present, but the way we work with artists and the way we work together in our team. It has also on occasion led to mistakes and messes, sometimes attempting to run before we have learned to walk a particular path, but I think the underpinning curiosity and commitment to teamwork prevails.

SG: Your restructuring into a horizontal organizational model has attracted a great deal of international attention and recognition in the field of the performing arts. How could the characteristics of your collaborative structure be summarized in a few words?

RG: I wasn’t here when this happened, so in a way my retelling is something like folklore. But I arrived as the guest dramaturg within a year of this action in 2017. The reorganization of the VIERNULVIER team followed an internal crisis related to the management of the organization. At that time, the team took the courageous decision to make public, and open up their thinking and strategy in creating a new model for the organization. In a really beautiful gesture, they applied a programmatic dramaturgy to an internal strategic process, involving the team, the stakeholders, the audience and the city in rethinking, mostly the HOW of the organization. This program was called Blauwdruk (English: Blue print), and it lives in all of our internal processes––horizontal organizing, cross-disciplinary teams working thematically, a commitment to minute-taking and transparent reporting on activity, a commitment to our network in the city of Ghent, an understanding that our program includes everything that happens in our building and not just the program that our artistic team creates, a rich mix that lives in our core communications message: Nothing for everyone, something for everybody. That said, we understand the way we work as a consistent movement towards horizontality. The project has not been achieved, and it is a consistent challenge that motivates the organizational engine.

SG: What prompted you to take this initiative?

RG: What prompted the team at VIERNULVIER to take this initiative was really a call back to our socialist roots and a desire to consciously challenge and flatten hierarchies in our structures, in the way we work, in our approach and attitude to programming. This reorganization coincided with VIERNULVIER becoming one of nine “Kunstellingen” in Flanders––national cultural institutions––and it is telling that at this moment, the organizational instinct reached towards sharing power, transparency and creating access wherever possible.

SG: In your horizontal organizational model, you work specifically with different teams, roles, mandates and consultation methods. Your self-description on the homepage also emphasizes that “everyone at VIERNULVIER who feels the impact of the program volume may help decide on the agenda [...]”. How does this affect the curatorial work in your institution in concrete terms? Or, to put it another way: how does the content-related and conceptual work develop in a horizontal structure? And what does this mean for your daily working practice and your (collective?) curatorial decisions? 

RG: In truth, this relates largely to the program as a totality, which is a mix of program generated by our artistic team, program that comes from our network partners, and the program that comes from venue hires. Our colleague Lies Vanborm, coordinator of program and production, leads our various teams in planning our seasons in such a way that there is enough space, at different times, for advance artistic planning, and more short term reactive opportunities that come to the table on a weekly basis through cross-team ”intake meeting”. On a curatorial level, we regularly make our programm with partners and practice co-curation, whether it’s with concert promoters for one-off gigs or series’, university departments on annual calendar events.

With regard to festivals made in collaboration with a range of partners, the process varies. For example, the upcoming Openbare Werken, co-curated by the partners of the Tot in de Stad! network of organizations working with artists over long trajectories in the city, we are bound by shared co-creative practices that prioritize process over final outcome, and are largely situated extra-mural.

With GIF, the festival is made with a range of other institutional partners in the city, it is largely driven by a common understanding of each other’s work, and knowing that by working alone, we would not achieve the desired outcome for either artists or audiences.

In both instances, the co-curation is underpinned by the collaboration of a round table, where we understand that different partners bring different gifts to the table, and we attempt to practice equity in the way programs are formed.

Within our own team, we meet weekly to update each other on artistic and practical questions and try and take two longer moments per year to consider the bigger artistic picture with a reflective eye.

SG: How do you see VIERNULVIER's “attitude” in the European institutional context and what makes it different?

RG: VIERNULVIER is perhaps less concerned with questions of exclusivity than is present in the European institutional context. We are a big house in a small city and our primary goal is always to make the thing happen. The solution in making the thing happen is usually found in the instinct to partner up. We regularly work with our colleagues in NT Gent, Campo, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Democrazy and others to make artists' projects happen that we wouldn’t succeed in presenting alone.

Furthermore, there are no white gloves in our house, and if you come and see a show in our theaterzaal, you will likely get a whiff of the beer spilt at a party the night before from the back staircase. That is the attitude of our house - it all happens here, and we try and respectfully make room for all kinds of cultural experiences, without making a hierarchy of value around them.

SG: In order to further deepen your transformation process, you have been setting up a working group to include, in addition to employees and suppliers, resident artists, audiences, platform partners and neighbors in your decision-making processes in the future. Your goal is—as you put it on your website—to establish "a kind of parliament of VIERNULVIER". This process began in mid-2022. What is the current status?

RG: This is not quite where we are. As I understand it, when the organization was renamed, a plan to create this biennial parliament of stakeholders was mooted but has not yet come to pass. In mid 2022, the first iteration of the VIERNULVIER “jong panel” (English: Young panel) was formed, and a second cohort took up their place in September 2023. After their first year of working, they have presented us with how they see themselves, which is really as a critical think tank for the organization. This is an evolving project; the “jong panel” organize themselves to meet monthly, and they also attend staff meetings at VIERNULVIER and are part of other cross team meetings, including the current “group of 15” we have, tasked with creating and delivering an anti-discrimination policy and plan for the organization. Two members of the group have also been elected to our board of directors.

SG: You are also focusing on the idea of viewing VIERNULVIER as a “platform” rather than an autonomous institution. What exactly does that mean? How are artists and artist curators involved in curatorial decision-making processes?

RG: How we understand this is that we have a responsibility to work in partnership wherever possible. Whenever we start a new project or program, the first question is “who is the right partner for this?”  

As mentioned in an earlier question, our intake process allows space for lots of questions that come to us to find a place in our program, and for all intents and purposes, to the broad audience of 350,000 who attend events here annually, there is no distinction between an event that has been programmed by our artistic team and something that was proposed by our network, or another organization that hires the space.

With regard to artists and artist curators, at this moment in time, there are no defined roles for external artist-curators, but our artists-in-residence (“huisartiesten”) and organizations-in-residence are part of an ongoing dialogue with our artistic team about our program. All of the programmers on our artistic team also have their own artistic practice, which informs our work.

SG: A member of your young board is quoted in a university masters thesis as follows: “Does it work? Not always. Is it perfect? Far from it. But they do.”[1] Where exactly are the problems of a horizontal organizational structure in practice? How do you deal with them?

RG: Where to start?!? Again, I think it’s important to say that we do not consider ourselves as a horizontal organization but rather one that strives towards horizontality. I agree with the quote above––our structure is far from perfect. And yet, in trying to match the HOW of our work to the values of our house, it is the best we have and we work on improving it every day, with the unilateral commitment of the team to doing better, and not sitting on our laurels.

Some of the problems we encounter include:

– the additional time it takes to have the meetings to ensure broad consensus and the inclusion of all voices that want to participate

– when that participation is allowed and encouraged, it means you have to come good on the promises you make to listen, which sometimes means rolling back on promises or agreements that are made with other parties in response

– reaching consensus or making a decision without consensus when decisions need to be made

– addressing conflict or disagreement in the absence of hierarchical mandates

– acknowledging that there actually are hierarchical mandates within our organizational structure

– identifying and naming power that is invisible but being enacted in decision making

– supporting artists to navigate working with an organization where there are many points of contact (we have good workflows to deal with this but they too are a constant work in progress)

– when you have a vision for the house that is not only about what is on your stages but how you work, it intrinsically means that the work is never done, and this can be exhausting, and it’s hard to know where to draw boundaries

– when you have a vision for the house that is not only about what is on your stages but how you work, you will inevitably make mistakes and fail to meet the standards you have set for yourself

– working in an organizational structure like this is not easy for people early in their career; with a flattening of hierarchy there also comes a lack of entry-level opportunities to learn on the job.

How we deal with all these problems, and a lot of others to boot, is by naming them and a continued project of trying to address these problems in our daily work, and via annual bench-marked actions that are led by the coordination team. As well as the art we present, the desire to constantly improve this imperfect and evolving project is something that really drives the organization and all of the team who work here.

SG: Do you have any specific advice for colleagues who would like to embark on a similar transformation process?

RG: I think it's really worth considering whether you are willing to do the work, and whether you can engage in the healthy conflict and sometimes difficult conversations needed to be able to work in this way. You will also need the resources to staff adequately, and I think something that works in VIERNULVIER’s favor is that our salaries are determined via national service grades that are applied across the arts and in other sectors. In other countries, where there is more autonomy around salary levels, I think a lot of serious and open conversations would need to take place about money and power to make a new organizational structure moving towards horizontality.

Another feature of our work here is that we, and the artists we are hosting on any individual day, are provided with lunch, that most of the team eat together daily, and I think this shared table, and moment of collective hospitality adds to the renewed and daily commitment of collaborative, respectful and equitable working in our house.

Róise Goan, born in Dublin, has been Artistic Coordinator with Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER since May 2023. From 2019, she was the artistic director and co-ceo of Artsadmin in London, one of the UK’s leading production houses for interdisciplinary art projects. She has worked as an artist, producer and programmer with numerous arts organizations. Róise studied Drama and Theatre at Trinity College Dublin and graduated in 2004. In 2008 she was appointed director of the Dublin Fringe Festival, where she founded Fringe Lab. Highlights of her freelance career include artist development collaborations with Prime Cut in Belfast and two applications for European Capital of Culture. In addition to her work in the performing arts, she has written for television, most notably for the TG4 series Aifric. She was appointed to the Arts Council of Ireland in 2022.