Dear Baltan Fellows and BlaBlaLab community,
Over the past year, we have been offering workshops and lectures on an open-donation basis or through very low-cost tickets, with the intention of keeping our activities accessible to everyone. Today, we would like to speak openly about the work, care, and resources that are needed to make each event possible.
Our programmes are developed together with local and international designers, artists, emerging makers, and students. We aim to support them by offering a secure space in which their time, knowledge, and commitment are fairly compensated, even in a context of ongoing financial cuts affecting cultural institutions, and particularly small organisations like ours.
To give more transparency, we want to share an example of the costs involved in producing a single workshop: artist fee (up to €400, depending on experience), materials provided during the workshop (up to €150), travel expenses (up to €50 within the Netherlands), and up to €300 covering the work of our team (hosting, communication, production). This adds up to a total of €900.
We usually open our workshops to a maximum of 15 participants. This means that, if costs were covered solely through ticket sales, depending on the costs, a single ticket would amount to roughly €40 - €60 per participant, just to break even.
Please note that this calculation does not include meet-ups and try-out sessions, which are informal, community-led moments of experimentation and not fully developed workshop formats.
In the last year, we introduced the open-donation system to allow flexibility, trusting in the awareness of our community when contributing to these activities and seeking for a more sustainable relationship between our institution and our community. But the open-donation format only covered a small part of the costs we need to sustain. Therefore, we want to invite everyone to reflect on the economic value of the events they have attended, in order to avoid a dynamic where time, care, and labour are taken for granted.
For this reason, and in light of the ongoing lack of cultural funding that affects us, we are moving from open-donation tickets and low ticket prices to more sustainable paid registrations. We want to stress that ticket prices will remain as close as possible to the minimum required to fairly compensate guest artists and designers, along with the people involved in curation, organisation, production, communication, and hospitality. We will also continue seeking additional funding to support the programme, so that we can keep ticket prices as low as possible.
At the same time, we recognise that paying a full ticket price can be difficult for some members of our community, especially students. For this reason, we will continue to keep a window open for those who cannot afford it. If that applies to you, please feel free to reach out to us and we will find a solution together. Additionally, each event will include a limited number of early-bird tickets at a reduced price.
We remain a small cultural organisation committed to keeping our activities accessible and supporting the community of practitioners around us. This commitment will not change. What we ask in return is for participants to help sustain our work, so that we can continue offering these moments of learning and exchange.
We believe you will understand this shift as an effort to care not only for our community, but also for the people and structures that make these shared moments possible.