Bottom-up rise of creative industry

Creative arts have a long history in Slovakia – almost every Slovak knows the houses in Čičmany adorned with folk-themed artwork, or the award-winning international film director, Juraj Jakubisko, to name just a few examples. But Slovakia’s creative industry, unlike in other countries in western Europe, has developed slowly since emerging a little more than a decade ago.

The reason behind this, according to Slavomíra Salajová of the Creative Industry Forum (CIF) – an association of groups supporting the creative industry – is that too much focus has been put on simply distributing financial support to the industry, while more needs to be done to promote and develop it.