The Company

Mission.

Well… we’re not here for a haircut.

CuriousWorks’ mission is to subtly reshape the systems of cultural production in Australia, for the benefit of all Australians.

Our work is always about instigating a more diverse, more accessible, more surprising, more imaginative arts and media scene in our home country. We want creativity and innovation to be a part of every day life for all Australians.

We establish long-term, multi-faceted partnerships with those who are working towards the same goals.

We believe the arts and digital media can bring the stories of those in the margins into the centre of our society – for the long-term. However, we believe this must be done through a best-practice model that brings real, positive change to the people and communities that are involved in this process.

We do not document the stories of marginalised communities or engage in short-term programs with them. We work to empower their local cultural leaders to use digital media to represent their own people in their own ways, for the long-term. In doing so, we hope to slowly build empathy and social inclusion within and between these communities and well as those in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian society.

Through extensive, respectful collaboration, we also develop innovative creative initiatives for the stage and screen that give prominence to Australia’s untold stories. The initiatives are multi-platform, in public spaces and aimed at fostering public dialogue around contemporary Australian issues.

Based in Sydney, Australia, our work will always possess the characteristics of the country that inspires it: intercultural, interdisciplinary and clearly challenging its status quo.

History.

CuriousWorks was built upon the success of a Sydney-based cultural initiative, The Migrant Project, which brought together over 40 Sydneysiders with cultural and artistic ancestries from across the globe. From 2005-2007, over 2,000 people attended the series of performances, screenings and conferences that resulted from this project (a feature film of the project, This City is a Body, has just been completed and will be released in early 2010). By 2007, The Migrant Project had established CuriousWorks as an innovative, emerging, cultural organisation.

From 2005 – early 2008, CuriousWorks had been run out of the living rooms of various share houses. Shakthi, founder and director of the company, had been running it on a primarily voluntary basis and was rather tired after three years of snowballing craziness.

In order to build somewhat more sustainably on the promise of The Migrant Project, in late 2007 Shakthi concentrated on continuing CuriousWorks not as a project-based organisation, but an institution that sustainably empowered and promoted the diverse perspectives of marginalised communities around Australia. Finding success in a number of grants in early 2008 – crucially including the Vodafone Australia World of Difference grant for Peter Cossey – CuriousWorks moved into its first offices in May, a warehouse right next to Sydney’s Central Station. CuriousWorks’ first permanent staff were Shakthi Sivanathan, Peter Cossey and Elias Nohra.

Throughout 2008, Peter, Shakthi and Elias designed an innovative model for building and sustaining media capacity in marginalised communities using emerging technologies. Called All Around You, this model was designed through long-term collaborations, on the ground, with communities in Western Sydney and the Pilbara, Western Australia. This regional focus has continued into 2009 (we have trouble remembering which side of the continent we’re on) and the model will be complete in early 2010, with a toolkit and innovative training course that can be scaled to marginalised communities anywhere in the world, interested in building social cohesion by growing media and creative capacity.

2008 was a year of rapid growth and in March 2009 Naomi Bower came on board, building partnerships with our diverse set of funders and clients. 2009 has seen increased growth in CuriousWorks and we’ve developed a real, meaningful business plan that outlines the distillation of CuriousWorks’ next three years into some key, kick-ass, core programs and services.

Come 2013, we’ll be happy if we’ve continued to systemically empower the innovation of awesome, creative individuals towards social justice goals; developed more high-profile, successful works of art that promote widely the perspectives of marginalised Australian communities; and established some major, ongoing partnerships with funders, businesses and like-minded organisations that can take our All Around You model nationally and internationally to the communities that want and need it the most.

We would like to publicly thank our most critical supporters over the years: the Australia Council for the Arts, Vodafone Australia foundation and most recently, Country Arts WA, BHP Billiton and Westpac Foundation.

One step at a time…

Check out the CuriousWorkers.
Check out our 2009 Annual Report.