KazanSummit experts: ‘Our task is not to be executors but initiators’

09:00, 09.08.2021

Tatarstan was insinuated that the identity should be promoted through creative industries

Creative industries partly lost money offline but found new funds online — and these funds must become an instrument of local promotion. Attendees of Local Identity and Creative Industries round-table talk, which took place at the 12^th Russia — Islamic World KazanSummit 2021 International Economic Summit came to such a conclusion. Read more in Realnoe Vremya’s report.

“It is a new industrial policy of Russia”

Tatarstan Minister of Culture Irada Ayupova who noted that 2020 became life-changing in establishing economic processes became a moderator of the discussion. How did it influence the creative industry?

“The creative industry is a new industrial policy of Russia, any country,” noted Sergey Kapkov, head of Research Centre for Economics of Culture, Urban Development and Creative Industries laboratory at Moscow State University’s Faculty of Economics, former minister of culture of Moscow. “Creativity is an ability of thinking in constantly changing circumstances. This is why Russians — citizens of Russia — are so successful.”

The pandemic accelerated processes, said Kapkov, since the youth learnt how to work online, started to gather in co-working, on Zoom.

“Our task is not to be executors but initiators, creators who create meanings,” Kapkov said and noted that iPhone was made in China but it was invented in California.

To speed these processes up, ministries of culture, education and industry should work together. Legal reforms are no less important, indicated Tatiana Abankina, director of the Centre for Applied Economic Research and Developments, so that Russian legislation will consider an idea as an intellectual value.

Sergey Korotkov, director of the Centre for International Industrial Cooperation of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Russia, indicated that 30 million around the world work in creative industries. Due to a cancellation of public speeches in 2020, this sphere lost 30% of honoraria for master classes, workshops, lectures. This is minus 7 billion of income. Moreover, the interest in digital content grew, while another 0,5 billion people started using social media by early 2021.

Moreover, Veronika Peshkovva, a UN goodwill ambassador for industrial development and president of Women’s View Public Diplomacy Development Foundation, creative industry provide now more jobs than the automotive industry of America, Western Europe and Japan altogether.

Why is this important for Tatarstan?

“When a high intellectual component is added to consumption objects, this causes interest in culture,” Peshkova noted. “Using services and products of creative industries, we are inspired by a local identity.”

She immediately presented Ayupova a carpet from Iran that can get warm. Of course, it was adorned with national patterns. Peshkova expressed her hope that in cooperation with Russia Iranians could make such carpets with a Tatar ornament.

Creative industries also transform an attitude to history, said Fatma Ghali, director general of Azza Fahmy Jewellery.

According to her, completely new brands appear in their sphere. They become recognisable, and this changes one’s attitude to creativity whereas they make a legacy an element of today.

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to see a new intellectual product made in Tatarstan. However, there is obviously demand for such projects — not to sell chak-chak, a brand of the culinary capital, Innopolis but an ordinary and popular position in the marketplace reading Made in Tatarstan.

Radif Kashapov

Tatarstan