Written by Matt Walton

Every project begins with a conversation. Sometimes it’s with an artist over a coffee. Sometimes it’s around a meeting table. Sometimes it’s a passing comment that doesn’t quite make sense until weeks later. 

At the end of July, we travelled to Rotterdam and Delft thanks to support from Art Fund’s Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grants Programme. Over two days, we visited six contemporary arts organisations, meeting the people behind them, exploring their spaces and talking about everything from commissioning and artist support to hospitality, architecture, learning and public programmes.

By the time we boarded the ferry home, our notebooks were full. Not with finished ideas or neatly packaged conclusions, but with questions. Looking back, we realised we’d spent surprisingly little time talking about exhibitions. Instead, we kept returning to projects in the broadest sense, and all the different ways contemporary art can become part of everyday life. 

After a few visits, we started noticing a pattern. Every organisation approached contemporary art differently, but each had found its own way of dissolving the boundaries between artistic practice, public space and community.

At Radius in Delft, it was impossible to separate the artwork from the extraordinary buildings that housed it. A former water tower and underground reservoir weren’t simply exhibition spaces. Their history, architecture and atmosphere became part of every project that took place there. It left us wondering how often we think of buildings as containers for art, rather than collaborators in the creative process. 

At Nieuwe Instituut, we joined a guided tour that encouraged everyone to slow down and spend time with the work before reading any interpretation. Rather than being told what to think, we were invited to respond instinctively and let the conversation develop naturally. It was a simple idea, but one that stayed with us. Sometimes the most valuable thing a gallery can offer isn’t another explanation, it’s permission to pause.

Then there was WORM, where music, performance, exhibitions, radio, hospitality and community all coexist under one roof. It’s joyful, energetic and just the right side of chaotic. The building feels as though it has grown organically over time, shaped by the people who use it rather than a carefully drawn masterplan. After reminiscing about their takeover of Humber Street Gallery back in 2017, we left thinking less about individual projects and more about the importance of creating places where people genuinely want to spend time.

One conversation, though, kept resurfacing throughout the trip. 

At Kunstinstituut Melly, one of the organisation’s former exhibition spaces has been reimagined as an artist designed social space. It is still very much part of Melly, but it now also functions as a café, meeting place and bookshop. Lauren was immediately interested in how the space encouraged people to spend time differently. As we talked between visits, we kept returning to that idea together, gradually realising that the space wasn’t simply supporting the gallery’s programme, it had become an essential part of it. That conversation stayed with us for the rest of the trip, and we found ourselves noticing similar approaches in different forms everywhere we went. 

One of the unexpected joys of travelling together was discovering that we rarely came away talking about exactly the same thing. One of us would become fascinated by a building, while the other was already thinking about how audiences moved through it. We’d compare notes over coffee, challenge each other’s assumptions on train journeys and occasionally realise we’d both been looking at the same thing from completely different angles. Those conversations often became just as valuable as the meetings themselves. 

Without really noticing it, we also found ourselves talking about Hull more and more as the trip went on. We noticed how public sculpture quietly became part of everyday life across Rotterdam, how children and young people were encouraged to engage with culture from an early age and how each organisation felt deeply rooted in its own neighbourhood. None of it made us want to recreate what we’d seen, but it reminded us that the most exciting cultural organisations are often the ones that are unapologetically themselves. 

Perhaps that was the biggest takeaway. 

Travelling somewhere new doesn’t give you all the answers, it simply helps you ask better questions. It was reassuring to discover that many of the organisations we admire are wrestling with exactly the same challenges we think about every day. How do you support artists in meaningful ways? How do you create spaces where people feel welcome? How do you keep evolving without losing sight of who you are? How do we respond to changes in our audiences and communities? 

We’re still talking about those questions. 

We’re hugely grateful to Art Fund for making the trip possible through the Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grants Programme. We came back with a renewed sense of curiosity, some new connections, several thousand extra steps on our counters and notebooks that we’re certain will keep finding their way back onto our desks over the coming months. If even a handful of those conversations go on to shape future projects at Humber Street Gallery, the journey will have been well worth taking.