Finding Your Seat at the Table: Navigating Morality and Compromise in The Creative Industries

ame/Eroteme and Another Sky have come together to create a participatory workshop exploring how creative practitioners sustain their work while navigating institutions, financial realities and personal values. Led by Sherif Dhaimish and Olivia Melkonian, whose practices span publishing and audio production, the session draws on their experiences working across both independent and institutional contexts. Through discussion, anonymous polling and small group exercises, participants will reflect on questions of compromise, autonomy and creative survival.

The workshop invites participants to consider what they are willing to trade in order to sustain creative work, including time, stability, income, creative control and moral boundaries. Small group discussions will focus on common dilemmas faced by artists and cultural workers, such as balancing artistic risk with financial security or working with organisations whose values may not fully align with their own. The session concludes with a collective reflection on how creative careers are built through negotiation between independence, institutions and personal values.

The workshop will first take place on 18th April as an off-site event during Another Sky’s 2026 festival at Cafe OTO, then appears on 2nd May in Stockport:

18th April
Another Sky
Dalston CLR James Library
Dalston Square
E8 3BQ

2nd May
Pink
2nd Floor Hilton House
Stockport
SK1 3NA

Olivia Melkonian is a producer, DJ and sound artist who has worked across radio, record labels, film production and the cultural sector. Invested in projects of cultural preservation, Olivia archives dialect, ritual and collective memory with a focus on family and the home. In her work, Olivia interrogates the endangered Western Armenian experience, which remains under threat of erasure. Through her practice, she presents memory as a tool of resistance and recording as an act of revolution.

Sherif Dhaimish الشريف دهيميش is a publisher, writer and champion of local stories. As director of Pendle Press, he has collaborated with publishers such as Manchester University Press and New Dimension to produce an eclectic range of books. With degrees from the University of Leeds and King’s College London, his writing has appeared in Left Cultures, New Lines and nb. Magazine. He is the co-author of How You Make Me Feel: The Life and Legacy of Marcus Intalex (Velocity Press, 2024).