Collaboration and Community Building with Caroline Wynne, Artscope

Priya Patel: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the arts and everything in between. I’m your host Pria Patel. In today’s episode, we are chatting with art scopes, founder and director Caroline Winn about collaborating community building and managing arts projects with multiple stakeholders.

Caroline shares some wonderful stories from across her 30 plus years career in the arts as a performer. Educator and program manager.

She is an absolute force of nature with some great insights on managing national and international festivals and events. Without further ado. Here’s Caroline.

Welcome to the arts and everything in between today. I am delighted to welcome Caroline wind to the podcast.

Caroline is the director of art scope. Art scope specializes in the provision and management of high caliber arts programs and events for government bodies, local authorities, national and international festivals and [00:01:00] projects, schools, and community groups.

Art scope was founded in 1997 by Caroline music, education, and theater studies graduate.

ArtScope initially worked with school arts programs and has expanded its event management portfolio to include a wide range of national and international festivals and events, including creative connections, Ireland, such as live Sligo rudy abou Leah children’s music festival and Marley park walled garden festival.

So we’re so happy to have you here today, Caroline. You’re very welcome.

Caroline Wynne: Delighted to be here, Priya.

Priya Patel: So Caroline to kick us off. I wondered if you could expand on your bio a little more and tell us about your journey into the arts.

Caroline Wynne: I studied music in college and I suppose back in the 80s when you went to college to study music in Ireland, it was very one dimensional and you went there to be a classical performer and to either teach music or play in an orchestra afterwards. So I wasn’t as lucky as the current graduates were. The arts world is your [00:02:00] oyster really once you graduate. Luckily I was practical enough to realize quite early on that the performing career wasn’t for me. I just was realistic to know I was a piano player. I was a harp player. And I, while I loved playing, there were so many things.

people better than me there, which was lovely to find that out at a particular stage rather than spending 10 years and then the disappointment of it. I did go down the route of teaching piano and teaching music and teaching orchestra in school, and I had 10 wonderful years. immersing myself in education.

And I suppose because I wasn’t specializing in any one instrument, I got to, learn a little bit about lots of different instruments and try and pass on a starting point to children and teenagers. Throughout, as I was teaching, I always still felt that I wasn’t in my niche. And I joined a local arts festival committee and back then arts festivals were run voluntary and you know you gave everybody [00:03:00] for their own genre of expertise was on the committee and I can still remember it could be sometime around 1996 every month when we met you know there was always Things in the post, people advertising their wares.

And one evening I opened this letter and it was from a company in the UK. And they were advertising that they would come and run your festival for you, help you program it, do the PR, literally be what we now know as event managers. But back then in Ireland we, I thought, I looked at this and I read it and I saw all of their services and I thought, How wonderful is that?

And I thought, imagine people pay to actually manage the event. And so that’s stuck in the back of my head that maybe somewhere down the line that this was the future of planning of arts events. And so I was also interested in music therapy and I was planning to study music therapy, but also, At the end of the day, what I thought was, let’s put everything into the mix.

And when [00:04:00] I did that, I found that managing events was what I wanted to do, and maybe get paid for it, not always be voluntary. And that I also wanted to keep within the strand of education, which was very much my comfort zone, and which I felt was very much the starting point for where the arts should be going.

And so just out of the blue one January evening. I decided to to come up with a plan for Artscope and with the idea of piloting it for a few months in different schools and trying to plan arts festivals and just get myself known out and about and starting full time doing it then the following September.

So by September 1997, I had left teaching and I was out in the big, bold world of arts management. And so I haven’t looked back since.

Priya Patel: Oh, wow. So really a spark of inspiration. Okay. So can you tell us about some of the earliest events you were managing and organizing with art scope? [00:05:00] How did you build up art scope?

Caroline Wynne: Maybe 16, 17 performers into the school.

And we worked at workshops with all the different classes in the school. And at the end of the day, they all came together in a hall. And there was a high energy, interactive performance of percussion and juggling and, music events. So it was very, it was a wonderful experience for a starting point.

And that was in the education strand. And I, Then a lot of schools asked me to just coordinate and help them run arts events from maybe if a music teacher wanted to do a project on jazz that I would bring in a jazz artist for six weeks or if they wanted to do an arts festival. Back then, it was all about what connections you had through telephone numbers.

There wasn’t, you couldn’t go on and Google, how do I find a percussionist to come to County Leitrim or to County Wicklow? You had to ring someone up and say, do you have any connections for that? So I suppose I [00:06:00] became for a number of years and pre Google, I became the little black book of arts and practitioners for workshops and performance.

And that’s then it took off from there with, and then gradually performers would say to me, Oh, I think I could do a workshop on that. And the portfolio in a very simple and unstructured way, it just continued to grow. My first encounter with working with the local authority was in 1999. And at the time, there was a very groundbreaking project taking place in the West of Ireland, where Sligo County Council had decided to take in a, to audition for a string quartet, which would become a residency in the county for three years.

So They auditioned quartets from Ireland, the UK, Germany, Russia. There were many contenders for it. And the successful quartet were the Vogler [00:07:00] Quartet from Berlin. So they moved to Sligo. They didn’t actually want Lock, stock and barrel. They came and lived two weeks per month for three years in Sligo.

And in that period, they would give recitals, they’d give workshops, tuition. And at the end of the first year, the county council has, I was managing that project then. So that was my first time into the adult world of managing something professionally. And we were all learning the vocal quartet were from East Berlin.

They weren’t very long, in the West they their schooling, their early schooling from the age of 10 right through was in East Germany. So they were on a big learning curve. I was on my own learning curve and the groundbreaking county council were also on their journey. And it just happened to be one of these things that was, at the time, groundbreaking and very successful and the people of the county took it on board.

And so we ran a festival year one, the Vogler Spring [00:08:00] Festival, and it was a festival of chamber music in Sligo. It was wonderful, it was in the grounds of, it was in the church where WB Yeats is buried outside of, and it was just a wonderful experience. And we did that for 20 years. And I still continue to work with the Vogler Quartet and they still have very much roots in in Sligo.

And we’re now continuing to work on other chamber music events around Europe, where I’m programming them in different spots. And they’re going to be their next event with me is going to be a chamber music weekend in Sitges actually in 2025. So that was my first, we call it adult event management plan.

And it was, So energizing. It was getting into the communities, getting into the schools and most of all, it was dealing with and working alongside really high quality professional artists and you can’t go wrong if the quality is right you’re on the right track, [00:09:00] really. So that was the first grown up art scope experience.

And that was in. The first festival was in 2000, so we started that in 1999, and we continue to work together, myself and the Vogler Quartet, still. It’s been a lovely journey.

Priya Patel: So clearly art scopes work is really vital in terms of collaboration and community building. So along those lines,

What are some big changes that you’ve seen in this aspect specifically in terms of say audience engagement, development, and impact.

Caroline Wynne: Think a key thing at the moment is that the arts, the place of arts in the community has changed so much since my first adventures. And back then, people, it wasn’t in their in their, diary to to program in go to a concert at the weekend.

Yes, they go to the pub, they go out for a meal, but unless it was something really that they were following for a [00:10:00] long time or that they had a great interest in, people didn’t just take attending events as part of their daily social life. So I noticed that has changed so much. And I think a lot of that is down to good education practice.

And if you have the infrastructure within the education system, it’s going to roll out and evolve into community practice from there. And Again, I remember just a number of years ago when I was teaching, bringing a group of students to a concert in a, in an auditorium in Dublin. And I remember them, them coming in and I overheard one girl saying Oh, I can’t believe the likes of us are here.

And I remember saying to her, what do you mean? She said this kind of a, we were going to an orchestra and it was a lunchtime concert. And I remember she felt that this was not something that was for her. And then she said at home, we wouldn’t listen to this kind of [00:11:00] music and we wouldn’t go to events like this.

And I just thought that’s really the. the nuts and bolts of where of change, finding out and interrogating, why that girl felt as though a concert, wasn’t in a large auditorium, wasn’t for, I don’t think it was the genre of music. It wasn’t, it was the intimidation of going into the space and not knowing how to navigate the concert experience.

And that would so not happen now. Community has evolved. Family life has evolved. Festivals have evolved to include and be so inclusive of the entire community. And I think just to go back, I did mention about my first working with the MacKenzie Council. Since then I’ve worked with maybe eight or nine different county councils around Ireland and their role has changed in the community as well.

Back in the, the late 90s their job was to promote culture within the county, to find money to promote it, but they also found themselves being the people [00:12:00] producing the events. And, for a number of years, they were all things to all people. sectors of the arts community in their county.

Now everything is much more strategic, it’s much, based on research, based on just a conversation. It’s just it’s a different landscape now. And the funding is now strategically managed. And the people applying for funding have a track record, and they have a niche that fits into that particular funding opportunity.

Priya Patel: So I guess what you’re saying is that it’s really opened up now which in turn invites broader audiences.

Caroline Wynne: So I think it’s almost like a, Hand in glove situation now where things are matched correctly and that took a number of years and the Arts Council of Ireland were, funding and creating new funds all the time and I remember when I used to look at the Arts Council for what they were funding, maybe 15 years ago, there was a limited number of funds available and [00:13:00] sometimes they weren’t even available for organizations like myself to apply for.

They were for individual practitioners. Whereas now when you go on, like you’d need to take time out of your day to read all the various interesting and accessible applications. It’s no longer even the wording is very much geared towards the person in the community who would like to run something in their local.

area if they have the, the good planning in place and a track record. And it’s also geared towards the creative producer to manage a larger fund. So it’s definitely the conversations have been listened to, I feel, over the years and the community. as a whole are more educated and you wouldn’t find the 14 year old now being intimidated.

No matter what walk of life they’re from, they wouldn’t be intimidated anymore by going to a concert. They would feel that was, part of their cultural journey. And it might not be something that they would go home and say, Oh, I’m looking 18, but it’s something that they will have taken in and [00:14:00] built their experience on.

Like I even have friends of mine at the moment. which this wouldn’t have happened years ago. Friends have children who are equally proficient in bass guitar and classical clarinet, all in the one house learning and all, one going off to play with their band and the other going off to play with their youth orchestra.

So again, there’s an openness at home to to see where the musical journey goes and whether those children and those teenagers ever even consider. continuing in the professional realm, they’re at the moment, they’re pitching themselves there that they could, and that they’re equipping themselves with a musical education that could bring them anywhere.

They may end up, taking off in the direction of science finance, but they will always bring that knowledge and that, and it will, it’ll, I’m trying to think of it’ll make their social life and their creative life in their adult life flourish and be very all encompassing because they won’t feel a threat by it and they’ll [00:15:00] just feel familiar familiarity with different genres of music and I think that’s the key thing that you’re not going into study music to be a leader of an orchestra or to be a, a, band that’s selling sold out tours in the States.

You’re going there to equip yourself with something as important as sport or as anything else that has been part of. So community has grown up, Priya, I think. And from that collaborations form, Now, collaborations are, they’re a word that’s used a lot and, but they’re actually an awful lot more dense than the word itself lends itself to be.

Priya Patel: Yes, definitely. I think collaboration. Is almost a buzzword at this stage, but it is so much more complex, especially if you were talking about a real collaboration and not just lip service to collaboration.

Caroline Wynne: I remember my first delving into a genuine collaboration. was when I started [00:16:00] doing the Irish Festival or the Creative Connections Ireland Festival in Sitges, which is just outside Barcelona. And it evolved from, it was the year 2013 and Ireland had just received the EU presidency for the first six months of 2013.

There were Culture Ireland and Culture Ireland do amazing work. I’ll come to them later. They had sent out a call to various arts organizations to see if they wanted to do something connecting Ireland with any other part of Europe. So I just happened to come across it in my inbox. I was just back from holidays in Catalonia And I had loads of energy after having three weeks away from the computer.

So I delved into this and I thought, how wonderful would this be? And I used the word collaboration with such ease. And then I was awarded the funding for the first the first event. We never thought it would continue into a festival. And I can remember getting a call from the funders and I’m saying, okay, you have a very wide portfolio of [00:17:00] things you do in Ireland.

In venues, in demographics, and in genres. But you haven’t actually worked outside of Ireland. Are you ready for trying to do a collaboration out, away from? from Ireland and I said, of course I am. And I thought I’ve done rural, I’ve done urban, I’ve done education. This is not going to be difficult, but it was very different working in a different culture, working with a different culture, working in a different language.

Something as basic as the in Ireland, we programmed Generally, we program concerts for indoors because of the weather. In Catalonia, they’re programmed primarily outdoors because of the weather. And I remember one of my all time Things where I hadn’t thought it out properly was where I invited Sam Graia, which is the instrument that leads a lot of the parades in Catalonia, and I invited them to come to the opening of the Irish Festival and to perform.

And it was in a small [00:18:00] space, and I hadn’t got the chance to, quite realized what the instruments sounded like indoors. And it’s just, I thought, Oh, that should, it should have been in a different context. Now, everybody was very interested in it. It was lovely to hear it close up. But again, I realized very quickly why we had the tin whistle in Ireland for indoors.

Because we weren’t going to be trying To play it leading a carnival, so it was just that was very different. It just there’s a whole lot of learning and you have to open your mind and you have to also bear in mind when you’re collaborating abroad that you have to have, a respect for where you are and what they’re doing.

And it’s not necessarily your comfort zone, but you’re going in, you’re collaborating. So you have to open your mind and collaborations, they’re slow. They really take time. You cannot impose a collaboration. And unfortunately, because they take time and they’re slow, they take a lot of specialized funding for it to be a genuine collaboration.

You can put two people in a room from different countries and say, you play some of your music and you play [00:19:00] some of yours, and you have a nice concert of two different genres of music. You don’t have a collaboration really needs it needs somebody to lead it. It needs somebody to marry the understanding of both music.

Genres and both cultures and to be respectful as well of us because we all, if we’re, if our Passion is something we just all believe that’s the best route to go. And you really have to be pulled back now and again and say, hang on there. There are more than one player here.

So collaborations, and I think while funding of the arts and understanding and promotion of the arts is coming a long way and has come and is just really electric at the moment. I do think maybe a little bit more work is needed around genuine collaboration. Otherwise, it’s just tokenism.

Priya Patel: And so do you feel you are really seeing sort of real collaboration, especially in the younger artists just coming up.

Caroline Wynne: Yes, we are definitely. And I do think that, there’s a lot of reasons for it. I suppose [00:20:00] education is the foundation of a lot of us and an openness. And I suppose in the past, a lot of music was passed down. In, from home to, from generation to generation. That’s why traditional musicians.

Their children became traditional musicians and the jazz musician, their daughter was more likely to be a jazz performer, maybe then a channel singer. But now I think there’s such openness and, youngsters are listening to everything. They’re opening their minds. So it’s, it is definitely it’s making a very different stage.

And it’s also, it’s, Giving more opportunities to performers. They don’t have to anymore. Just think of their niche markets and their niche audience. And social media and YouTube and Spotify, all of these things that, they really have opened up. They’ve just made everything so much more accessible.

And they’ve made the work and the journey of the promoter so much easier as well, because we no longer have to, when I think back at my early days, everything, I was [00:21:00] surrounded constantly by paper and envelopes and labels, and, the notion, and I remember a colleague of mine ringing me up, and I was, oh, busy Monday afternoon, I was surrounded by paperwork.

And I was saying, listen, I can’t chat to you now. I said, I have to do a mail shot of 700. And I’m just at the envelopes here and have them all printed out. And he started explaining to me about this new thing. He said, in two years time, you’re going to be able to put all of those people’s address into your computer and send that to everybody.

I said, okay, I said, that’s not going to be today. So I’ll chat to you later. And like when I, every time I do a CC or a BCC now, I think of that day in maybe 1998, 99 where we, everything was slow motion. The first festival I ran, we couldn’t complete the brochure because the, one of the pianists was living in Russia and his photograph hadn’t arrived in the post.

That was 19, that was March. 1999 [00:22:00] we were sitting in our office waiting for the post and with the picture of the Russian pianist so that we could complete the brochure. I would then have had to drive that said picture to the printers, whereas now everything is immediate, like we record stuff on our phone it’s out in the public realm.

Instantly. And you can, people can choose to ignore it, block it, do what they like with it, but it is permeating their listening and their experience. And that will, that, that all rolls out into a new stage. Now where that stage is going to end is scary. It’s scary. But if somebody, the day I was learning about what this CC of an email was like a wondrous day for me as well.

So I’m sure there’s lots of new experiences ahead for all of us.

Priya Patel: Yeah, there must be huge excitement amongst artists for these sorts of collaboration opportunities.

Caroline Wynne: Yeah it, it has changed a lot and it’s definitely, it’s moving faster because now the Irish musician coming to Catalonia, they can Google [00:23:00] a performer.

They can even call me in advance. Some of the performers who come regularly to the festival will send me a link and say, have a listen to this person. I believe they’re, they’re in Catalonia. They’re not too far away. Maybe we should think of them for the festival. So the research is done and it’s not quite condensed into the one, the experience on the ground, the listening can be done, the research, the communication can start in advance so much easier of sharing music, sharing tunes, sharing ideas. And a lot of that, I suppose in the past would have been done even a number of years ago would have been done by email and all by, By writing it all down and, connecting with the idea through text.

But now it’s just a link here and the link there and you’re immersed in the other culture. So that does it, it’s, it does, it makes it more, it makes it more instantaneous, and it’s like the homework is done a lot of the time then before they meet on the ground. And I think the Irish music has just it’s just.

Priya Patel: So leading on from that. What are your thoughts [00:24:00] about Irish music on the world stage and into the future then?

Caroline Wynne: It’s been revolutionized in the last 10 years, and it’s taken so many other ideas on board, but still maintaining its own identity. And but yet, new interesting sounds, interesting time signatures are being used, there’s just a whole playing around within the genre that wouldn’t have happened.

Again, going back to when I was teaching, I remember I was always interested in Irish music, but back in the, And my 16 year old students were not a bit interested in it. And I remember we used to have one hour a week in music class where we’d, do something that wasn’t on the curriculum.

And they’d suggest we do this, so we do that. And I used that to be honest, pretty a lot of the time to learn myself and to keep up with what was going on in the world. But one of the days, I think it might’ve been March and we were coming up to St. Patrick’s weekend. And I said, now, okay, next week, now we’re going to we’re going to do a whole day of listening [00:25:00] to Irish music and just discussing Irish music and who the main performers are.

It was like as though I had, I, I. marked double homework for the rest of the year. No, nobody wanted to listen to it. No, why can’t we do this? Why can’t we do that? And that was like, and I really, at that stage, would have been worried for the future of Irish music. But certainly now, only last week, I was working for the Organisation Music Generation, and we were down in County Carlow in the centre of Ireland, and working with young traditional ensembles, traditional orchestras, coming from right around the country.

We had maybe 130, 140 students there from, I think, eight different counties. And they were all at the top of their game in arrangements of music and learning and proficiency in their instruments. And they were all school age, all under 18. 18 and under, some of them 13, 14, 15, but and they were being mentored by tutors that they would be listening to [00:26:00] regularly themselves.

But you just come away from that thinking Irish music is in such a good place at the moment. And I think again, there’s a pride in the identity associated with it. And Culture Ireland is the organization in Ireland that funds professional musicians. to travel and perform outside of Ireland. So they have been, they would fund the performers who come from Ireland to the festival in Sitges.

They are funding, really wonderful cross the board, multi genre events. all around the globe. They have, there’s no corner that they haven’t popped up with their logo and have funded the person to be there. And I think that has really, it has sent the performers, it has, Go out there and make your music, let it be a commissioning of a new piece of classical music.

Let it be an arrangement for a trad orchestra or a singer [00:27:00] songwriter. And they’re getting further, out there further. Like in Ireland, we’re a small country. They do, they need to have an agency that promotes their music. to a larger audience and to a larger stage. And that is happening, also, the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris and the new Irish Centre in New York. It’s a new strategic way, of looking at Irish culture because it’s been funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Culture Ireland. And it’s the hallmark, of quality of Irish performance regardless of the genre.

And I think, I’m hoping that the journey on that will be that every major city in, that there’ll be a major Irish Arts Centre in at least one city in, as many countries as possible in the next 20 years. And I think that would, the amount of people I know who live in Paris who wouldn’t possibly have gone seeking out a concert of a classical [00:28:00] piano player from Ireland or a fiddle player from Clare, but now because it’s been managed, it’s been it’s become a place that They frequent, they bring their children for workshops there, they go to the concerts, they’ll all be there for Patrick’s weekend in the courtyard, similar in New York.

So that’s a new, it’s a new strategic way of funding Irish arts globally. And I think it’s a very strong way because you’re just, you’re, your rubber stamping quality and your ring fencing it as well. And then, that becomes the barometer then that you want to go and you hear good quality music and then you’re not going to accept something in, being blasted out at you from a sound system in the pub that’s, so it’s just it’s a good experience.

And yeah, I think everybody has been, is a winner on in Where we are at the moment.

Priya Patel: Wow. That is so wonderful to hear such an exciting time for artists, but also for audiences, I think. And just [00:29:00] to shift gears a little at the minute we talked about collaboration and community building. Which of course means multiple stakeholders. And do you have any advice or tips for arts managers when managing multiple stakeholders? Especially when dealing with really collaborative projects.

Caroline Wynne: Of things that you need to really watch out for, be careful of, or be, sensitive to? There is no sense of us and them, that I’m the performer, you’re the administrator. Everybody is in the game together and, we’re all trying to get the best out of the working experience.

Working with the artists, I find it’s a wonderful experience. And they’re so willing to just put, to put their heart into it. To just, not have everything the one fit for all stages, they want to communicate about what’s the audience going to be like here, how big is the audience, how, they’re not just churning out the product now, they’re [00:30:00] actually, without actually realizing it, I think they’re involved.

in their head with audience engagement, before they even take to the stage, whereas in the past that might have been something that evolved while you were performing, but now there’s a lovely openness around the artist experience and They’re getting interesting work as well that maybe wouldn’t have been there years ago.

And yeah, so that’s definitely the easiest part of it. For me as a programmer and as a curator of events, my biggest challenge is managing my budget because I get so excited. When I sit down with the Greenfield Excel sheet, and I’ve been offered money by the county council to run X number of events over maybe a month in the summer and I look there and I think oh we can have this and we can have that and it just then it’s difficult not to have mission creep where I start off thinking we’ll have this, and then I think, no, we’ll add on this is just going to make it wonderful and we’ll have this.

And then suddenly I’m thinking, Oh, my [00:31:00] exuberance doesn’t always match the Excel sheet. So I always have to make sure I have somebody having sight of my budgeting so that I don’t get overexcited and run off with this. The community needs, I think I’ve talked about that a lot from the point of view is people are actually.

They’re finding out what the community needs are and there are so many different organizations within organizations that are targeting the various demographics and front of the various age groups the various new communities. So there’s a lot of work being done there. That’s feeding into the programming.

And again, if I’m programming something, in an indoor space in the west of Ireland, it could be very different to the programming that I do in an urban outdoor space. So community needs are being even if you look at the, culture night, every county, promotes their own culture night around their county in September.

And that’s a great gathering of people that go, they perform [00:32:00] in, local libraries, they perform on the street, they perform. It’s a lovely holistic day where everybody is celebrating their local culture and all communities turn out to that. There’s such a wide range of arts workshops and music workshops for children now, that the adult audience is actually passively, and the adult community is passively learning about new genres of music.

And it might be because they decided just to amuse their child at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, and then suddenly they realize, Oh, that’s very interesting. And you’re opening a whole series of doors for a family and, a new, a new listening experience, a new music experience. So I think the community needs now that you could never do enough.

How long is a piece of string? You could never put a full stop. It’s like when I’m programming an event, it’s really hard to put the full stop because you keep thinking of, Oh, I should let that person know what’s happening. Oh my God, I didn’t do this. You’re constantly you’re thinking of where else you could [00:33:00] engage and it could, your head would be going around in circles thinking about that all the time.

But certainly it’s, the community is being it’s been engaged with by, surveys even by, arts plans. Every county in Ireland has an arts plan that they develop every five years and they, they run seminars, evenings and, talks and community. engagement hours in the lead up to that.

So the arts plan is informed by the local community. So there’s a voice for the community, I think, in the arts that’s. That’s, it’s ever growing, I think now again, how many voices can you possibly listen to and accommodate all in the one budget? It’s, but thankfully that’s not my, that, that’s happening in the higher echelons of the arts than me.

I’m just implementing at the next level, but it is happening and it’s been very considered at the moment. Local authorities, their roles have changed [00:34:00] so much. The role of the. The arts office now is very much in the strategic planning and in the budgeting and the funding, and they’re much more omniscient than they would have been in the past.

They’re not out there having to sell the ticket and bring the cash box to the door. They’re there planning, and that’s, I think, a great position to have somebody in that, that they’re actually, when I’m on the ground, I’m going to think what I’m doing is the best thing and that all the money should go to me.

But I think to have the presence of an arts officer and an arts department overseeing the engagement right down through the community to your zero year old children, so that’s, I think that’s that’s a very good role. And also Great. Can I use the dreaded word COVID lockdown?

A lot did change after that in a very positive way. Artists became and performers became, so vital. In the sustaining people’s mental health, their day to day [00:35:00] existence during lockdown. And I also think then by virtue of that, that the funders realize this isn’t just something we’re doing to humor the communities and humor everybody.

This is an absolutely essential part of our society to fund performers, to fund new music, to fund creativity. And a lot of, again, as an emergency measure in lockdown, There were funds going round to promote arts, to give back to the community. For myself, I was really lucky to work with the South Dublin County Council project.

And they had a, the government initiative was the local live, where they invested in each county. To pro to promote the artist and pay the artist for events in a very controlled environment in 2021. And so the art scope project that evolved from that was the Rev. We called it the Revival of Live.[00:36:00]

And we did in the first, the first round of that funding, we actually employed, I think, 113 people with the Revival of Life funding that we got. Other organizations in the county got it as well. And from that a lot of, new, a new way of looking at it. And the artists then realized that their locality was very important, that knowing fellow musicians of their.

their caliber in their own environment was very essential for a lot of reasons. It, yeah it was very empowering, I think. And we, when we moved on from the revival of live and now they, it was such a positive experience. And I think all promoters like myself around the country gave such good feedback back to the local authorities and that went up the chain.

That there’s now in South Dublin, they have an annual programme now called South Dublin Live, where, which is an initiative to do things outdoors, [00:37:00] indoors, to just engage with the creative community. So it went from the local live and our umbrella of that was Revival of Live, and it’s now the umbrella of the county is South Dublin Live.

And that, hundreds and hundreds of people will be, and that’s, Absolutely directly a fallout of COVID and of the funding and the place placing of the arts at that time,

Priya Patel: Absolutely. Yeah. I think what you said there about COVID having some positive impacts is so true. And that’s not to diminish the awfulness of its impact on so many levels. But there were at least a few sort of rays of light, I think

but reflecting a moment on community building amongst performers, particularly what’s been your experience.

Caroline Wynne: I think again, maybe it’s just so easy for artists to connect now that it’s not about in the past that, they went did their gig did an ex, Friday night gig, Saturday night gig, Sunday night gig. And it was all very much, it was, quite in isolation. Whereas now [00:38:00] there’s a great willingness for performers to, if they’re doing a gig somewhere Saturday night, Oh, let’s invite my colleague.

I know they’re free. And that suddenly you have the performer who’s advertised. bringing their friend on and doing something that they might have performed 20 years ago. So there’s a lovely feeling of community building around that. And the festival that I, that Artscope manages and runs in Sitges, they, it’s, we called it Creative Connections because I suppose that’s what I saw it to be.

And we called it Creative Connections Ireland because the plan is that it would be making Irish creative connections, wherever we did see the need or the opportunity. Now, fortunately, and unfortunately, the City Aids Festival has made life so busy that there isn’t time to start looking elsewhere.

Every now and again, I think, Oh, I’d love to do some collaboration in Turkey, or I’ve had lots of places I’d love to do stuff. But Time is against me, I think, and so I’m just [00:39:00] so delighted with the connections we’ve made in Sitges between the Irish performers who travel over and the local connections with local performers.

But, it’s a slightly peculiar environment, that festival, because you have the Irish performers coming over And part of the deal is they have to come and stay four days because otherwise parachuting in on a Friday and home on a Saturday won’t really bring now in obviously, if somebody really has a particular thing to get back to, we would facilitate that, but it’s lovely.

They come in on a Wednesday night and they go home on a Monday. And they’re out of their own environment. They’re having breakfast together. They’re not having to pack the bag every day and drive to the gig, have the sound check in this new space, meet a new me every day. They’re just, they’re embedded there.

They go for their swim in the morning. I remember a number of years ago, meeting a performer coming down the street at eight o’clock in the morning with a barrel on case. And I thought, Oh my God, there must be a workshop on I’ve forgotten about [00:40:00] this. Where is it? And I said where are you off to?

Is there a workshop that you’re programmed for that I’ve forgotten about? And he said, oh no, he said, I just went for a lovely swim at seven o’clock and I put the towel in the Bowerong case. And so that was him wandering around St. James with the Bowerong case filled with a towel. So they come, they have their When they sit at the beach and suddenly somebody says, Do you remember that tune or that piece we played when we met at such a festival years ago?

And suddenly that’s revived. And that’s a lot to do with, I think, the wandering nomadic spirit of the Irish performer that has spent centuries just wandering around the island of Ireland, and they get their They get their wings and head to Sitges for five days, and the light, and the climate, and the, the leisurely eating, and of course the cava.

It just, it does bring about there’s a different, and I’ve had so many performers and they’re not the same. It’s genuine. They say to me, something happens when the Irish performers come [00:41:00] to Sitges. Something happens over those five days. And one of the performers told me that as far as he knows, six albums have actually come out of the Sitges Festival, where somebody meets a performer that they wouldn’t have worked with before.

They go home, they continue to meet up. And so creativity happens. And as My good friend Catherine Young, Catherine is a, Catherine Young Dance, and she featured in our recap video of 23. And she said, it’s not just a community of artists who come to St. James, it’s also the audience as a community and a community of like minded people who like to travel, like the feeling of being away and the light, and, but that they also appreciate that when they go into And as the days of the festival roll on you’re going to hear something new on every stage because the person on the stage is going to have said The singer they’ve met in the hotel lobby the night before.

Will you join me for that song? And then they [00:42:00] say to the clarinet player, Will you join us for that one? You’re actually evolving daily with the festival. That by the time our final concert on the Sunday of the festival last year was programmed for no crows, six musicians, And 15 musicians actually appeared on stage.

, the festival is a sound engineer and a stage manager’s nightmare because you can never write a stage plan for that festival. But 15 performers ended up on that stage all, providing quality entertainment, quality performance all on things that have just happened over the few days.

So that’s very much about being the community of performers and time to spend together and performing. If you’re on the circuit, it can be quite lonely, can be quite tiring. Whereas the Sitges experience is it does, it allows things to happen. And then the audience, it’s not often as well, that an audience go to a festival and that they get to, to, meet their, the [00:43:00] performer that they’ve come for and they get to see them having a coffee on the street and they stop and chat.

And because everybody is outside of Ireland as well and in a, the beautiful country, tone of stitches. There’s just a, there’s a lightheartedness, and in that sphere things grow. And then people come back to Ireland, the audience, and then they, they source that, that performer and they travel to them in, north of Dublin, or they go to Cork to them.

And Likewise, the performers support one another. One of the performers we had at the festival last year, they did a wonderful launch of the new cafe orchestra in the National Concert Hall in November. And I think they, they had maybe 20 or 30 of the Sitché’s audience. came to that event because of it.

Priya Patel: Yeah. Creative connections is so different in that. Way.

Caroline Wynne: Yeah, things happen. Sitges is a very special place and a lot of things happen there, but I do think it’s the neutrality of it and time because performers are on a roller coaster and they’re self [00:44:00] employed. Nobody is, handing them an end of week or summer holiday.

pay or anything, so you’re constantly creatively living on your nerves as well as financially living on your nerves as well. So that, space for artists and I suppose, I put myself in that role as well that if I have time as somebody curating something down the line are programming an event.

It’s nice for me to have the time to sit and talk to the performer and suddenly they will say to me, I played with such one. Oh God, 20 years ago, or are they, they’re playing jazz now. And they say, I started my life as a classical performer and you’re just learning. And from that, you’re getting ideas.

You’re igniting ideas yourself of where that little bit of news could take you and how that could develop into a new program. Yeah, so it’s, That, that community of audience, I think, and that happens very much at smaller events. That’s, I remember saying to [00:45:00] somebody a few years ago when I was planning something and said, how will that work or, and I said now, it’s, we expect a listening audience and the person laughing at me, they said, how can you expect an audience to listen?

They’re going to be out. And I hadn’t actually realized that I was pushing that responsibility on everybody that, it had to be this listening. But I sometimes think as well, if the atmosphere is right and if the engagement is right and they, The number of people for what you’re presenting is matches that you will have that listing experience, and that it will, and we don’t, as a company, we don’t do any of that.

We have worked at some of the larger festivals, but that wouldn’t be what we curate or produce because it’s just not, coming from the journey I have, it’s been more niche things. And I think in that. You can make interesting, you can make wonderful things happen and just seize that moment of where people are open [00:46:00] enough to go.

A lovely moment a number of years ago at the festival was John Sheehan from the Dubliners. And he was in a restaurant and the owner of the restaurant came up and said are you John Sheehan? And he said, I am. And he said, my daughter loved your Merino Waltz tune so much that it led her in the direction of playing the cello.

And she’s now in Berlin playing the cello with an orchestra all because of you. So it’s a John. opens in the restaurant takes out the fiddle and plays the merino waltz and he says to the owner why don’t you ring your daughter so he rang his daughter and the daughter the cello player in Berlin hears John Sheehan in Sitges playing the merino waltz which was the catalyst for her music journey so you know there’s just Little moments.

It’s the little moments that you have to capture. And on the days, I suppose that programming and managing and promoting of something, it becomes [00:47:00] tedious and you’re just thinking you’re on a merry go round that’s never going to stop. And where do you, at what point in the lead up to it, do you say I’ve done enough now?

And then suddenly you’re in the middle of it and you realize you’ve forgotten something. It’s just, it’s very challenging. And a lot of the time, I often say, I just want to be, do something that doesn’t involve any expectations in my next career. But it’s still worth it when you get those little moments and there’s so many of them, I can’t even, there’s so many more of them that just, they’re little nuggets that keep you going.

And I think once, when you share those nuggets with people it makes. It springboards to them appreciating the little detail of what makes the experience special. And, yeah, I’m, I’ll stick it out for another while, Priya. You have to. Yes, exactly. I love that idea of what you were saying about sort of ArtScope’s focus in terms of kind of these smaller, [00:48:00] more intimate really audience

it does. It’s the reason why exactly and what propels you on. Yeah. And it is those little moments and they are, you don’t, notice them when you’re in the middle of them. It’s only afterwards you look back and you think I have one other little story and if you don’t have time for it, but this was a very important moment in the festival in Sitges.

We used, we still do a lot of poetry and a number of years ago we had a celebration of a poetry press in Ireland. And We also then, side by side, we had three Catalan poets, three Irish poets, and long, very long, winding story short. At the end of the poetry reading the Catalan poet said to one of the Irish poets, he said do you know of the poet Pierce Hutchinson, and the Irish poet Peter Fallon actually from Gallery Press said, Oh yeah, he said, we’ve published his work.

And the Catalan poet said I’ve, an interesting thing happened to me, he said, I’ve a suitcase in my [00:49:00] attic full of Pierce Hutchinson’s, memorabilia. Pierce had lived in Barcelona for a long number of years and had translated a lot of Catalan poetry into Irish and English. And when he was coming to the end of his time, he was ill.

And before he went back to Ireland, he was friendly with this nurse. And when he was leaving, he said, Will you take this suitcase of mine? And it contained a lot of really, in the world of poetry, quite important documents. And the nurse took the suitcase and Pearce said, I’ll be back now when I’m better.

Anyway, he went home to Ireland and didn’t get better. And so the suitcase remained with the nurse. The nurse then got, started feeling guilty and thinking I really should do something with this. The nurse’s son was in the University of Barcelona studying English, I think. And she gave the suitcase to the son who gave it to the poet who was at the festival.

He was lecturing in the, [00:50:00] he was lecturing in the university. And After meeting at the end of the poetry reading in Sitges, that suitcase was returned to Ireland and is now in Pierce Hutchinson’s archives in Maynooth University. Oh, that little chance meeting and chatting over dinner afterwards came about the suitcase and that conversation happened the end of October and the 7th of December the suitcase landed in Ireland and I think by Christmas it was Christmas.

taken to Maynooth University, to the archive. So little things like that are the moments that happen when people aren’t on the treadmill of, Finishing the gig, go to the hotel and onto the bus, go the next day to the next gig, or maybe not surrounded by thousands of people that it’s that intimate moment that those things happen.

That wouldn’t ordinarily happen. Now, unfortunately, there’s no grant for those kinds of little happenings. So you have to just hope they happen along the [00:51:00] way. But yeah, so there’s, they’re the moments that keep you going when you’re doing events.

Priya Patel: I really love that it feels really grassroots and genuine,.

On that note, what are some other projects that art scope is working on?

Caroline Wynne: I suppose the way we work as an organization, we have some projects like creative connections that I would call like the immediate family projects because we’re in control of it from beginning to end. Then we have other projects that would be almost like the first cousins of Artscope that we manage them, we fund them, we curate them, but they’re not entirely our own.

And then we have the, the first cousins once removed where we would be working for an organization. So we’ve, it, every day of work really is quite different because it could be, something that we’ve 100 percent responsibility for or something that we go in there and just make the event happen on the day.

But with not being indulged in the, we did a lovely event last Saturday in the wonderful in Dun Laoghaire, the [00:52:00] lexicon it was Ireland Reads Day and it was a day in celebration of reading and books and the lexicon library and theatre space. They had the whole building taken over with events.

So that was just a great day. Lovely day. At the moment we’re planning for a children’s music festival that we run annually in Lucan. And it runs over four days and it’s for the 0 13 year olds. So that’s always a challenge to keep up with what the 0 13 year olds do. Think is current. I use my nieces and nephews as , the trial for a lot of that.

But that’s a, it’s a great event. It’s, we zone in on performers who have experience working in that genre and and with that age group. So that’s a, and now we do it, it’s indoor, it’s outdoor. And we’d have maybe engagement of over 7,000 children o over the four days, which is good. Yeah, so we have that where we do a lot of we, we started doing a lot of videoing of projects and of music and of short music films.

We started [00:53:00] doing that over during lockdown and a number of projects evolved from that one called Follow the Tune, where we studied the music and recorded the music of North and interviewed the performers and just did a trail of indigenous stuff. traditional music through the musician and the tune.

So we still we update that every year and add more things to follow the tune. And that’s never ending with the amount, the wealth of music in North Riscommon. So I love, I do love that’s a new departure for us. I do love the videoing of things and the sitting down with it afterwards and the interviewing the artist and everything.

It’s lovely. It could be something maybe the control freak in me likes to be able to control it and to edit what I want, but it’s a lovely, and then It’s been the most successful things we’ve had on YouTube. Like some of the videos have had 80, 000 views around the world on some of the, just based on one tune and the performer talking about it.

So we’re off to do a bit more filming in March on that. And [00:54:00] I’m planning my work and some more gigs with the Vogler Quartet in Berlin. And then lots of days working on interesting things in, as backup. event management staff for events in the lexicon.

The revival of live from that, we have a new ensemble created called they started as some of the professional musicians that all lived in the same county. And then after we finished it During lockdown, a number of them decided we don’t get to play together often because we’re all doing our own solo work and other ensembles.

So they came together to create new music and new arrangements. And we didn’t have a name on it for a while, but because they’re all so busy, it was quite, it was quite difficult. It’s quite difficult for them to get together. So I was in the office one day and I thought I had the rehearsal sorted and then it just fell apart because one person had to go somewhere.

So I’ve just was chatting to myself as I often do to my computer. I said, Oh my God, this is like a [00:55:00] Rubik’s cube trying to get this together. I’ll just never get everybody. And then I suddenly thought yeah this ensemble is like a Rubik’s Cube because they’re all different genres of musicians.

They’re different stages of their career. They’re different styles of musicians. And it’s very difficult to make it all fit together into one, one color in the one time. So we decided to call the group, the Rubik’s Ensemble. So they’re a lovely, so we work together once a month, and they rehearse and we come up with new collaborations and maybe bring a new artist into the mix.

And they performed actually in Sitges last year and the year before, and they’re working on new material now for 2024. So that’s a very interesting one because it’s very much, Creativity evolving with musicians that you know, they don’t need to do this. They’re all very busy working musicians.

They really want to come together for just a creative reason and a creative platform. And if they get a couple of gigs out of us where they can showcase what they’ve put together, then that’s great. Everybody’s happy and we, there’s no there’s no clock ticking [00:56:00] on it, but it’s a lovely creative one. So that’s, yeah, there’s no standard month in the life of Artscope really.

It’s just it turns and then the beauty of it is, I remember years ago, Ago deciding that I’d love to work from, the word working remotely wasn’t even a word, but that if I could, sometimes because I worked for myself, there had to be some benefit to taking all the slack yourself.

Right? . And I thought how lovely it would be to move somewhere and work from there. But then where would you get Wi Fi and all, the dilemmas that went on 12 years ago, even. And I remember deciding I was going to buy a red laptop and I was going to sit somewhere with my red laptop and do all my work from there.

When I think back and that seemed like a dream and now, you’re walking everywhere and you’re sending an email, you’re sending a text you’re connected all the time. And that just has made, that has made my life so much easier. Yeah, it’s a. Now and again, when I’m in the middle of doing things and I’m thinking, Oh my God, I didn’t get to do, we didn’t do post about this.

And you’re [00:57:00] trying to keep up with all the moving parts. And then I’m thinking, Oh my God, things were all so easy when it was the envelopes and the labels and the stamps, but Oh my God, no, it wasn’t. It’s so easy now to just feel you can. It was sad actually years ago when I think of it some of the lovely projects we did and only a handful of people would know about them unless you had their address and unless you had them on your mailing list, they weren’t going to know.

Whereas now it’s, it just it’s lovely to see your work just, jumping around the internet and seeing it. Okay, you might only get five likes about something that you think yourself should get 500. How many people have seen us know about us and it’s it’s a lot easier than the envelopes and the labels.

Priya Patel: Caroline. You just have such a wealth of experience in this space. So do you have any advice for people at maybe say the start of their journey in the arts, or maybe even in the middle of their career?

Caroline Wynne: I think experience and as somebody young going into the business and you see back, even, in [00:58:00] Ireland a number of years ago, you could, and I think this has gone back to my very first five minutes of my bending your ear where I was saying I went to study music. But what I didn’t realize was I wanted to do what I’m doing now, but there was no platform.

There was no course. There was nothing you could apply for that. So you had to just go the scenic route around finding it. Now it’s the opposite. There’s so many courses around music production, music management, arts management, arts event management, that, there’s such a wealth of learning.

But I think I’d hope that younger people going into it will take the work experience because it, you cannot beat the experience of it. It’s so much built on the ground and some of the situations you find yourself in. I just, I don’t know how you could learn that in college. You can learn that now, maybe I could well have done with going to college to learn a little bit more about budgeting, but for young people starting into event [00:59:00] management, it’s the day before your event when you’ve spent this money and you have people coming and it, it’s a, it’s scary at times.

The days leading up to the festival in Sitges when I know 1500 people have bought a flight from Ireland to come to something that I’m responsible for. If you were to think about it you’d, you wouldn’t, you’d be paralysed and you wouldn’t even go to the event yourself. But, you have to couple the adventure You’re going to be adventures if you want to get into event management, but go with that adventure, but never underestimate The practical experience, like the going, being on the ground, even, standing at the door, watching how you manage a crowd, how you manage the awkward person that comes up thinking that vote for today’s event and it’s tomorrow’s ticket they have in their hand, the little simple little things of how to manage those little evolving situations that you cannot learn that.

And also to. Have a good knowledge about a [01:00:00] lot of genres. rather than feeling you have to be an expert on one, I think. And also, key for me is that I know where to draw the line on where not to interfere. Surround yourself by good people, and I always have a good stage manager, a good lighting technician, good sound engineer, and don’t interfere.

If you’re happy, be happy. that they’re good enough to be on your project, let them loose and don’t go saying, why do we need to move that chair? Do we need to do that? Let everybody then stay in their lane. And that’s key to it. I think because everything is moving so fast and in such a, there’s no reversing back and saying, okay, let’s close the door and start letting the audience in again.

We didn’t get it right the first time. So you just have to move with it. But I think it’s just important to, to just. to go with it, but to not to be afraid of it and to stay in your lane. And if this is what your role, and you can’t beat a good event management plan and stick to it. Now I’m the first to break that [01:01:00] rule, but everybody says to me, No, Caroline, your Bible is your event management plan.

And you stick to that unless something catastrophic means you have to change it. But it’s the only way everybody is going to know what’s actually happening. If you’re on the one page at the end of it all. Yeah, so that’s it. A few gray hairs along the way, but the experience is worth it. I think.

And a good work for people coming out of college with event management in their vision. Lots of different event management experience, like from a small little boutique gig to standing at a gate at a big one. It’s just, it’s not about being there shadowing the director of, you large outdoor festival.

It’s about just having that. And when I would look at somebody’s CV, if they were looking for work with us, I would look at the range of experience. I wouldn’t look at how proficient, unless it was a very, particular role I was looking for them, but somebody coming in working on the on the ground with you.

You just you like to feel that they [01:02:00] have been thrown into a few different scenarios and that it’s not and it’s amazing things that that you take for granted as you move on in the work. They don’t actually come naturally to people at the beginning. I remember working with somebody and in the early days, and they continued to work really well with us, while, they’re no longer, they were emigrating then, so we continued working very successfully together.

But the first few days that this person worked with us They stood facing the stage all the time, even though they were on a door. And I had to say, no, you have to turn this way to take the tickets from the people. And just simple things, and you’re thinking, how did that person not know that? And they went on to work very well with us.

So that was just the initial thing. So never take for granted that just because something seems seems, Just the, very simple because you’ve been doing it for years that you know the part everybody has to be given no matter what role they go into they have to be nurtured along as though presuming that they’re not sure what direction to face [01:03:00] when they’re standing in the door so you have to take it from that and be patient with them and patience is not my virtue.

Priya Patel: That that is some excellent advice, indeed, for sure. Caroline Any final thoughts for our listeners?

, I think we’ve covered so much there. I’m delighted to it’s actually almost therapeutic for you to go through the journey here. And yeah.

Caroline Wynne: And it’s not always I spent a lot, I have my regular people that are friends that I work with. Ring and I let steam off. It’s not every day, isn’t a glorious day. I’ve been self employed, able to meander off with your red laptop if you want to. But it’s, I think I have my people that I go to that I can have a good letting steam off and then they’ll put me back in, in on track again and away I go.

But it’s it’s. It’s a great journey and it’s been a great, it’s a great job to be in event management, production, all of that. And we’re in it at the [01:04:00] best time. I don’t know how better it can get really, because there’s only so many people can go to so many events in their lives and it’s just, it’s flourishing at the moment.

And, the genres, you go to a theatre and you look at their program and they’re facilitating so many interests and it’s no longer about thinking, oh, we just programmed this person because they’ll sell out, right? It’s about bringing and all the new awards that are out there, like last night had the the RTE Radio One Folk Awards.

And the amount of people who went along there and they didn’t all win. There was, I think, six nomination in each category, one wins, but just to see all the different styles that were there in the mix as nominees and, ah it’s wonderful to look at that list and know that’s where music is.

And then, another, you look on a Facebook post another day and it’s about, an indie awards and it’s about contemporary classical music, it is just such it’s such a great time [01:05:00] to be part of this because you’re at the cutting edge of so many genres and coming of age of a lot of genres, that were very marginalized for a long while and not getting the funding they needed and therefore they, the performers not following that.

that direction, but now it’s just, and I’m sure there’s people who will listen to this and say, what is she talking about? There’s still so much to be done. And there’s my God, there’s a neglect here and there, but it has come so far since 1997 for me that I couldn’t be happier. Oh absolutely. And with such enthusiasm and good thinkers who also stay in their lane of being good thinkers and don’t come down the line and try to inform them on the program. They let the creativity take its own direction and its own shape, but there are some really good thinkers out there at the moment.

And I admire them so much because I would never be one of them. I’d be a good organizer and I could talk forever, [01:06:00] But put me into a room to try and come up with a strategic plan for something that I’m not immersed in is such a different skill set. And I think that’s, there’s a there’s a thinking and there’s a style of education I think at the moment where it’s allowing younger people to be more critical thinkers.

And those critical thinkers are the ones going to inform on the future of events and it’s going in the right direction

Priya Patel: . , Absolutely

Caroline, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. It was really interesting and just really great to hear about your journey and art scopes work and get your advice about collaboration.

. Community building and audience engagement.

Caroline Wynne: Thanks very much. And wonderful work that TicketSolve are doing in keeping the show on the road from your end as well. It’s fantastic.

Priya Patel: That’s it from us at the arts and everything in between. And if you’re interested in learning more about art scopes work, you can visit [01:07:00] art scoped dot I. E. And if you fancy a trip to switches Spain, this October, Do check out creative-connections.edu that’s connections with an ex. The festival takes place from the 24th to the 27th of October.

And it’s always amazing. I highly recommended. As always, you will find the links and more resources in our show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do share it

Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.

‍