Has the artist been paid?

Opinion Artcultureworkers' rights Has the artist been paid? Ask Pay Trust 1536x1024 Relevant News Has the artist been paid? 7 September 2026 Court hears father returned with hunting rifle, threatened to “cut off” teacher’s legs, in trial over 14-year-old’s suicide 7 September 2026 Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Cyprus on September 10 7 September 2026 Yiorgos Savvinidis 7 September 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber From the applause to the payslip: what it actually means to work professionally in culture in Cyprus. According to the Cypriot calendar, today is the 37th of August. The heat’s still relentless, so nobody even needs to roll their sleeves up. Over at the Deputy Ministry of Culture, the honeymoon is well and truly over for Klea Papaellina, who, after a blitz of ceremonial meetings and courtesy visits in Cyprus and Greece, should by now have clocked that choppy waters and jobs with more strings attached than she’ll know what to do with lie ahead. She should have her list of problems and unfinished business drawn up, and a set of priorities ready to go. If not, that’s on her. Because sooner or later she’ll have to bend down and deal with the real problems, the ones that are tangible and hammering on the door. By day she’ll need to put in the graft at the Deputy Ministry, and on those warm September evenings she’ll need to show her face at performances, events and festivals, now that the engines of cultural activity are firing up again. Against that backdrop, a genuinely interesting document landed in our laps a few days ago: policy recommendations for securing fair working conditions in Cyprus’s cultural sector, drawn up through the “ASK PAY TRUST” conference held in Larnaca on June 10, under the guidance of Larnaca 2030 and international partners (Culture Action Europe, D6 Culture in Transit, and others). That day, artists, culture workers, researchers and policymakers sat down for an honest conversation about what needs to change, and how. About three months on, the finished, polished recommendations have been published, covering professional recognition for artists and tackling financial precarity, aligned with European policy frameworks and drawing on good practice from countries like Ireland, Belgium and Spain. They’ve already been submitted to the Deputy Ministry of Culture too, with the aim of feeding into current discussions and pushing for real policy. Let me offer two recommendations of my own. The first is to the Deputy Ministry of Culture, because documents have a habit of going missing or gathering dust on Ifigeneias Street: treat this report like a gift from the gods, manna from heaven, because it’ll save you a huge amount of time and effort mapping out the real substance of the sector’s most pressing problem. Not that it should matter, but one of the speakers on the day was the Deputy Ministry’s own “in-house oracle” (not my words), Director-General Giorgos Papageorgiou, who took the opportunity to underline the Deputy Ministry’s commitment to “fair practices, trust and dignity” (yes, really). My second recommendation goes to those involved, and especially to D6 Culture EU, who produced the whole thing: send these recommendations to the Ministries of Labour and Finance too, even if they just land with a thud and get ignored, like everything else. This set of recommendations can also work as a “strategic advocacy tool” for artists, culture workers, cultural organisations, networks and representative bodies pushing for a more coherent, evidence-based policy framework for cultural work in Cyprus. But here’s the real point: it forces the actual question onto the table, loudly. Can a person in Cyprus actually make a living from their art? And what is the state supposed to do about it? This is a systematic account, put together by people who’ve been in the trenches, who’ve been burned before, of exactly what isn’t working in Cyprus: from legal status and social insurance to pay, invisible labour (anyone who’s lived it knows exactly what that means), unemployment and the lack of workspace. And it becomes obvious, by extension, that bad working conditions don’t just squeeze artists financially, they squeeze artistic freedom itself, and the quality of the work. What needs to be crystal clear to those in power is that this isn’t some guild grumbling from people with an axe to grind. This is a cultural rights issue. The problem runs deep and it’s structural: the Republic of Cyprus has simply never managed to build a system that treats artistic creation as work. A culture worker might be salaried on one project, self-employed on the next, doing unpaid research and development on the side, then unemployed between contracts, and forced, on top of all that, to work outside the cultural sector entirely just to survive and keep making art. And yet, as the report points out, today’s systems are built for a straight, stable working life, one that simply doesn’t exist for most of these people. At the same time, the report flags the narrow definition of “artist” as inadequate, and calls for the whole chain of cultural production to be covered: artists, curators, producers, technicians, cultural managers, administrative staff, mediators, educators, researchers, and so on. Before the state’s proposed Artists’ Register, before we even reopen the file on the long-promised Artist’s Status, we need to be clear on exactly who counts as a culture worker in the first place. The official government line insists the relevant bill is at a “mature stage.” The outgoing Deputy Minister said as much when handing over the reins on August 6. But the official review a few months earlier had found the need to continue consultation, redefine the targets, and revise the bill. The set of recommendations we’re talking about acknowledges some positive elements in the bill that can be built on, but warns that the proposed 30% state contribution to social insurance is not, on its own, an answer to precarity. Nobody makes art on love alone. A piece of art can’t be called a success if it depends on unpaid labour or unequal pay. The state should have got moving on this ages ago: commitments backed by practical tools, fair working conditions guaranteed through inter-ministerial committees and social alliances. What’s needed, at the same time, is a framework with more transparent processes and budgets, and more structured involvement of representative bodies in decision-making. So keep those sleeves rolled up, then, so that one day we can prove wrong anyone who still claims the only culture workers with any job security in this country are the ones on the Deputy Ministry’s own payroll. Originally published in Eleftheria, 6.9.2026 Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News Court hears father returned with hunting rifle, threatened to “cut off” teacher’s legs, in trial over 14-year-old’s suicide Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Cyprus on September 10 New EDEK leader vows “a great deal of work” on first day in office Cyprus “Red Flag” app to launch, aims to prevent gender-based violence Christodoulides highlights UK’s role as Cyprus problem ‘penholder’ ‘Trump lost to Biden and came back’: Neofytou hints at 2028 presidential bid Death toll in Kyrenia ferry disaster rises to 14 as another body recovered Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.