French-born Pascale Hyboud-Peron moved to the Bay from England as a secondary school teacher in 1999. Since then, she helped start the Venture Centre, which is a technology-focused enterprise that works to connect the people, places, tools, resources, knowledge and support needed for sustainable success, across all ages.
What made you choose to live in the Bay?
In 1998 the New Zealand Ministry of Education had initiated a talent attraction campaign called TeachNZ. I got short-listed for two positions, one in Hamilton and one in Tauranga. I remember going to the library, opening an atlas and picking Tauranga: the geographical location, by the ocean, sold it for me. I have called Tauranga home ever since. I met my partner whose family arrived in Tauranga by boat a century before I did. The combination of a supportive home environment, a willingness to find my own way and the proximity of so many amazing people I was meeting here in the Bay made the transition from teacher to entrepreneur almost smooth!
How has being based in Bay of Plenty affected your role?
It is the people I have met in the Bay of Plenty who have allowed for unique opportunities. Meeting Venture Centre co-founders in 2013 marked a significant inflection point in my journey. It moved me from meeting like-minds to share ideas and concepts to engaging with like-minds to actually commit to build something together. Along the way of growing Venture Centre and its co-working space, Basestation, I got to develop a greater appreciation for the presence of arts and culture in our region but also for what it meant for me personally.
Growing up in France in the 1970s in a fairly conservative family, my experience with arts was something you go and see in a museum or a gallery. Artists were special people who had their view of the world and chose to express it for others to see. While my hometown Grenoble had some great architecture, and some quite avant garde venues for productions and shows, it did not quite register with my teenage self as markers of being surrounded by culture.
Since I have been in Tauranga, Creative Tauranga, now Creative Bay of Plenty, started, the increasingly magnificent art gallery is going from strength to strength, local groups like BOP Art and BOP Films exist, the Incubator at the Historic Village is gaining momentum, music and food festivals attract both visitors and locals alike, private galleries open, flourish and develop their own programmes, Toi Ohomai has a flagship Creative Industries programme, and that's only what I am aware of!
These to me are markers of the existence of arts and culture in our region, many drawing on preserving ancestral cultural practices and aiming to bring people together regardless of background or status.
What does arts and culture mean to you?
It gives me the opportunity to choose how I engage with it. To make a choice, I have to define what arts is and what culture is. The arts, it is almost easy to define: performing, visual, fine arts, applied arts, craft, film, digital media ... Culture is a little harder really, as it is not necessarily something I can touch or see. It is not so tangible: it is about shared values, beliefs and practices in the community I am part of.
Your role is all about technology and how we can use technology to create new opportunities in business. How do you see arts and culture interacting with technology and business in future?
Venture Centre's vision is for a community that is digitally empowered and I believe that technology has a big role to play in our community as it matures both digitally and culturally. Arts and culture are about creativity, as is technology. We are at a point where accessing art and culture online is a Facebook page away, where the pursuit of creative expression has never been more immediate, be it with one's pictures on Instagram or short films on YouTube, all published from increasingly ubiquitous mobile devices on platforms allowing near instant feedback. It does not make all Instagrammers artists, but contributes to developing an increasing sense of identity and aesthetics. It is a time of exploration of the mutually productive interaction of technology and the arts, where artists, engineers and creatives and everyone in between can collaborate. When they work together, boundaries are pushed in visual arts, with augmented and virtual realities, music, installations.
Why do you think arts and culture is important for any city? And why do you think it is important for the Bay, specifically?
I think that arts and culture is important for any city because all the formal and informal, tangible and intangible, professional or amateur cultural activities constitute a community's cultural assets. Often times arts and culture can provide a medium for supporting a community's identity by revealing it, but also by getting diverse people together and allowing learning and sharing to happen. How this pans out locally is, I hope, the object of the Arts and Culture Strategy being developed. It has been interesting for me to engage with this strategy. I see it as an essential next development stage for our region and hope it is bold and visionary but also practical, and that everyone in our community finds that it talks to them.
What would you like to see the Bay do better in future?
To do better in the future it is important there is coherence in the planning across sectors, technology, entrepreneurship, arts and culture, that there is clarity on what they will achieve and what they can achieve together, what activities would look like and who the actors and their roles are.
*To read the Arts & Culture Strategy and have your say, visit www.creativebop.org.nz, email artsandculturestrategy@gmail.com or pop in to the Creative Bay of Plenty office on Willow St. Submissions close at 5pm, June 30.