Re‑imagining Culture After Conflict: Working with Creative…

When Sian Prime flew into Erbil to run an intensive "boot camp" for creative entrepreneurs, she visited a country still wrestling with the legacies of dictatorship, occupation, violence, and cultural erasure. What she encountered there - particularly among young, often women-led creative initiatives - has reshaped her evolving definition of creative and cultural entrepreneurship itself.

Prime's Iraq odyssey came about by the British Council's aim to support the growth of creative entrepreneurship in the country. A recent mapping exercise found deficits in key skills and capacities critical to their success. Prime was charged with delivering an intensive 5-day bootcamp (a term she eschews) made up of around 20 individual creatives along with representatives from 10 cultural hubs. She developed a programme with two of Goldsmiths Associate Lecturers, Nicola Turner and Dr Gillian Wildman. The pace of learning was intense with participants, who came from across the country, working from early morning till 5pm each day and then into evenings.

The bootcamp's structure was as much about what Prime calls "inner work" as business planning. Participants began by mapping their own relationship to risk, physically moving around a line on the floor and then situating where their audiences, funders and communities might lie on this spectrum. They explored the trade-offs between financial return and aesthetic or social meaning, literally stepping into different points on a floor drawn grid to get a sense of what "fits".

From there talk moved on to more conventional entrepreneurial tools - audience development, value measurement, financial modelling and planning - but was always grounded in the lived realities of the participants and their context. Ready-made templates spelling out what to do were used sparingly and critically,

More compelling reasons sanctioned this approach.

Many of the boot camp participants were not simply starting businesses; they were working to re-discover and re-assert Iraqi culture itself after decades where culture was either tightly prescribed from above or violently disrupted.

Prime describes a country where culture has been contested, controlled and, under military siege. In this context, the work of the participants often sits precariously at the intersection of heritage, risk, and resistance. "Because of the numbers of different occupations and brutality that's been there, there's almost a sense of having to rediscover what their culture is rather than a culture that's been imposed on them."

One woman jeweller, for example, is reviving traditional weaving patterns by translating them into metal and enamel: "She's really working to bring back a traditional craft and then turn it into something contemporary that people wear to reconnect with their culture."

Another participant - a musician - uses folk and religious themes, including tunes associated with occupation and oppression, weaving them into new compositions. His work while artistically bold is socially precarious: "He's playing very much with folk and religious themes and tunes and occupation and oppression and erasure of the past. And he's facing challenges because some of the religious leaders find what he does to be on the edge of acceptable, and he may be banned from doing it."

For some women, the stakes are even higher. Prime recounts working with a female writer who had local campaigns run against her "because she was too much of a feminist" - labelled simply as "a bad woman" for insisting on women's rights. Others take more subversive routes, embedding feminist or critical ideas in forms that can slip under the radar.

Alongside individuals, Prime and her team worked with 10 cultural hubs - a library exploring how to become a "living archive"; a tech-oriented co-working hub grappling with how to support women entrepreneurs; young women filmmakers seeking to share stories of women's lives; and architects wrestling with whether bombed or formerly oppressive buildings should be preserved, repurposed or erased. Either way, Prime is clear: "In Iraq, being a cultural or creative entrepreneur can itself be an act of courage."

Prime hopes the impact of the Iraq boot camp will be felt at multiple levels. On a personal level, she wants creatives to feel less isolated, financially more viable, and connected into both local and global networks that she says is the usual legacy of entrepreneur gathering she has led in other countries. At a systemic level, she expects the boot camp participants to become part of a creative enterprise advisory structure to help shape future education and business support policy for Iraq's creatives.

Since joining Goldsmiths from Nesta, Prime has worked in around 30 countries, including Mexico and Iraq, and her view of cultural entrepreneurship has become both more global yet paradoxically more located. If earlier in her career she might have spoken in relatively universal terms, she now insists that cultural entrepreneurship must grapple with history, heritage and power.

What emerges from Prime's Iraq is a picture of cultural entrepreneurship not as a cleanly defined sector, but as a messy, brave, and deeply contextual practice: one in which young women wear traditional symbols that might once have been seen as quaint, but which now function as potent contemporary statements; where musicians test the boundaries of the permissible; and where architects, writers, and organisers collectively ask how a country marked by trauma can tell its own stories again.

For Prime, the experience has been moving, exhausting, and energising. It has also confirmed one conviction deeply in her mind, "In places like Iraq, creative and cultural entrepreneurship is not a luxury add-on to reconstruction - it is part of how a society rebuilds its sense of self."