Lewis Biggs talks to Laura Davis about his decade of running the city’s visual arts festival as he prepares to leave his post

BACK when the words “culture” and “Liverpool” were rarely used in the same sentence and critics still sniffed at the three-hour train ride up from London, Littlewoods millionaire James Moores decided the city needed a Biennial.

If Venice and Sao Paulo had them, why not Liverpool? And he was right, of course. In autumn, 2010, around 628,000 visitors made 834,000 visits to Biennial exhibitions, spending a total of £27.2m.

But while we all marvelled at Do Ho Suh’s dinky Korean house tucked between buildings on Duke Street and counted Hector Zamora’s giant concrete manta rays swimming through the Mersey breeze at Mann Island, the man who had ensured the contemporary art festival’s success was thinking about leaving.

Lewis Biggs has spent the past 10 years growing the Biennial from an unexpected event to one of the world’s leading visual arts festivals. But, from July, the organisation will have to manage without him as he moves on to new adventures – about which he remains vague.

“I’m building new things,” he laughs, when we meet to discuss his decade as chief executive in the Biennial’s offices on Jordan Street.

“There are a number of opportunities out there, and I need a few months to test which ones of them are going to be able to support me and contribute something to visual arts in the North West and to the country as a whole. I’m looking overseas much more and looking to Liverpool’s international connections.”

With four years of funding recently confirmed and the theme of “hospitality” decided for the 2012 festival, it is the right time for Biggs to go, he says.

“I knew I would be able to hand over to my successor with a sense of security,” he explains. “And there’s a good sense of direction within the programming team, but with a year and a few months still to run before the next festival opens it means the incoming person can still put their mark on the way the festival will feel and look.”

So it’s farewell to Biggs, who stepped in as the Biennial’s chief executive in 2000, having sat on its board of trustees as Tate Liverpool director for the very first festival in 1999, run by Australian curator Anthony Bond. But Liverpool will not lose him entirely, as he plans to keep his Wavertree home despite travelling to London more frequently to see his partner.

“To be honest, it was a bit of a joke,” says Biggs, of the art world’s reaction to the idea of a Liverpool Biennial – the dismay in part due to curators feeling under pressure to visit every such festival across the globe.

“Of course, that doesn’t last for long because people begin to choose which of the Biennials are worth going to rather than trying to see all of them,” he adds.

“Quite quickly, by 2004-2006, Liverpool Biennial had established itself as one of those that people wanted to go to, not only because of the quality of work but because of our collaborative model.”

It is this that sets Liverpool’s event apart from those in other cities – all the major visual arts organisations work together to make it happen. And it is that way of working that Biggs introduced to the Biennial when he took over in 2000.

“The early years were extremely rocky – it was all done on a wish and a prayer and without any public support,” says Biggs. “The trustees realised that an artistic director from Sydney, however brilliant, was not going to develop and grow the art infrastructure in Liverpool in a way we felt the Biennial could do.”

Followers of Liverpool’s Capital of Culture ups and downs will no doubt raise an eyebrow at that one.

“My job was really to restructure the way the Biennial worked from scratch, which wasn’t difficult because I was the only person working for it.”

Biggs has been invited by arts organisations in other countries to share his method of collaborative working, their interest piqued by the financial problems of the past three years.

“It’s a model that’s grown from the grass roots of the city and people realise to be sustainable you have to do that,” he says. “The kind of parachuted-in Biennial that grows no roots – which, to be honest, most Biennials across the world are – is really hard to sustain. It takes money, money, money because there’s no good will involved.”