A Cultural Deal for Europe: A central place for culture in the EU’s post-pandemic future aims to bring together the cultural sector and European policymakers to engage into dialogue, share ideas and co-develop strategies together for ensuring the central role of culture in the future of Europe. It is organised by Culture Action Europe (CAE), European Cultural Foundation, and Europa Nostra.
The online debate will take place online on 18 November 2020 3 pm – 5 pm CET and will focus critical questions about culture in Europe’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of Europe. With opening remarks by European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel and the European Parliament CULT Chair Sabine Verheyen.
Register via this link by 16 November.
We are excited to introduce you to a joint Hivos, European Cultural Foundation and Prince Claus Fund project: Forces of Art. See the Forces of Art website to learn more about how arts and culture shape societies across the world. Keep an eye on the book launch event - to be announced soon!
As in 2019 we partner with the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam [IDFA] to bring you a series of recent documentaries capturing ‘Life in Europe’. This year the festival takes place from November 18 to December 6.
The thirty documentaries selected for this pathway, invite you to think about our continent which faces so many questions today - maybe even too many. While it may not be the worst of times, it is certainly not the easiest. How we deal with the questions of our economy, the refugee crisis, education, the rise of the far right and more will define tomorrow’s reality.
One of the granted projects in our 2019 grant call ‘Democracy Needs Imagination’ was ‘Il Nuovo Vangelo’, by the International Institute of Political Murder [IIPM]. The New Gospel entailed an interdisciplinary project [campaigns, public events, performances, and a film] to talk about global human injustices, but rolled out in Matera, one of the two 2019 European Capitals of Culture.
The film ‘The New Gospel’ premiered at the Venice International Film Festival 2020. We had a mail interview with Elisa Calosi, production manager, and Giacomo Bisordi, dramaturg.
In the open letter, published on October 30, 2020, Culture Action Europe, along with other 109 pan-European cultural networks and associations calls the European Union (EU) and EU member states to protect culture as part of the coronavirus recovery plans and dedicate at the very least 2% of national Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) budget to culture and creative sectors.
What a strange year it has been in Europe. On the one hand, we have been closer together than ever before. From Finland to France, Poland to Germany: in one fell swoop, citizens of countries across the continent experienced how drastically a pandemic can change day-to-day life. Travel restrictions and border controls have divided us to a degree we haven’t experienced in a very long time. Even during summer holidays, it wasn’t easy or sometimes even possible to meet up to talk about life in the midst of the global pandemic.
When, if not now, should Europe come together for a conversation?
The European Green Deal is Europe’s roadmap for making EU’s economy sustainable. By 2050, the EU wants to be climate neutral. For this to happen, societies have to believe in the power of green initiatives. Our Culture of Solidarity grantee NOOR images aims to create iconic work documenting the recovery of Europe from one of the biggest economic crisis of our times.
We interviewed Weronika Koralewska and Joanna Doyu of our Culture for Solidarity grantee Agro Perma Lab on their project ‘The Supermarket Museum. Living together within limits’. Agro-Perma-Lab is an educational initiative working in the fields of agroecology, permaculture, deep ecology and food sovereignty in Poland. It is part of the global food sovereignty movement.
By bringing together artists, creators, and heritage experts in inclusive activities the foundation wants to help in making the city of Gjirokastra accessible. The project offers a rediscovery of traditional themes as inspiration and drive for young artists in the multicultural context of European identity.
Studio Rizoma's first public action is Pandemos, a one-day exhibition-performance which will take place online on October 27. The exhibition has been conceived as an artistic initiative entirely usable online, and all the works have been produced imagining a situation of lockdown and closure of public spaces.
Today is a special day in Hungary. The 23rd of October marks the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. No wonder the students of the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest (SZFE), who have been occupying their university since 1 September chose this day for a protest march to stand up for academic freedom and independence. The occupation and the #freeSZFE campaign, has gained large international support from leading public intellectuals, artists and citizens.
On Wednesday 14 October, the Europa platform sent a letter to the ministers involved in drawing up the Dutch plans for the European recovery and resilience fund prior to the EU Member States are expected submitting the first plans for the EU Recovery Fund. Read the full letter in Dutch here.
The project “activism for solidarity” aims to inspire the civil society to communicate and act in solidarity in creative and artistic ways to bring attention to social and ecological problems. The project has its focus in Eastern Europe and Russia.
We interviewed Vera Goshkoderia and Alina Minkova, to better understand where their idea comes from and to have an in-depth look at their project.
REGIONAL CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
European Cultural Foundation and Fondazione CRT invite organisations from the Piedmont and Aosta Valley to apply for the third round of the European Culture of Solidarity Fund. Set up at the beginning of the pandemic crisis, the fund continues to support imaginative cultural initiatives that reinforce European solidarity and the idea of Europe as a shared public space.
Good Chance Theatre embarks on The Walk. It is the story of one girl, Amal, but also of so many other unaccompanied minors throughout Europe. Good Chance Theatre will journey with Amal from the Turkey/Syria border, through Europe, to the UK, to both walk alongside her and discover her story and the story of the people she meets along the way. If Amal has a message, it might be simply: Don’t forget about us.
The Calvert Journal invites you to their Calvert Journal Film Festival; 7 days of New East cinema online, a digital film festival showcasing the diverse cinematic talent of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The festival will feature 7 films, screened online for free during the week from 12 to 18 October; each day a different film will be available for 24h.
The Black Archives is a Dutch unique historical archive for inspiring conversations, activities and literature from Black and other perspectives that are often overlooked elsewhere. Voices of Iberia in the Black Europe [VIBE] is a project by Educar and La Rampa magazine inviting Afro-Iberian artists to enter in dialogue with the current Black Lives Matter movement.
Both Black Archives and VIBE present on their plans, and afterwards we’ll have a conversation on how digging up and recounting stories from the past can help us transform our futures.
This year’s Lampa Conservation Festival took place in September. In the session our director, André Wilkens, took part in, technological advancement, changes in social fabric, rising inequality, climate change, the global pandemic, geopolitical struggles were the topics to be discussed. What kind of future awaits us, and how to prepare for it?
For our October 9 Community Conversation, we invited Pascal Gielen as our host.
Perhaps Corona taught us all that nearness as a concept - between persons, between political actors - is what we need to become interlocal citizens. What consequences does that have for our democracy? And for our arts and culture? In this community conversation, Pascal Gielen firstly presents a lecture, after which we’ll have a discussion.
We welcome these second-round grantees who grow immediate crisis responses into more future-oriented solutions and extend from local levels to building cross-national alliances and pan-European initiatives.
The projects range from Europe-wide campaigns on the topic of European solidarity to grants that support groups who are most severely affected by legislative or financial adversities during the pandemic, and from proposals on greening the future of our continent to projects revealing untold histories of Europeans.
For our September 25 Community Conversation we invited adelpi as hosts. They are an independent think tank and public policy consultancy on climate, environment and development.
In the session adelphi will share tools to help you kick-start your climate action journey!
The third edition of Forum on European Culture took place September 17 - 20.
According to the organisation “Now more than ever, we need the power of artists and thinkers to imagine a better future for Europe.” Want to find out what they imagined? Youtube!
Together with IDFA we present two documentaries by Polish director Miroslav Dembinski shedding light on the current situation in Belarus. The two films are free to watch for a week. Start date: September 17 2020.
The open letter on the European Democracy Action Plan and freedom of artistic expression is submitted in response to the public consultation launched by the European Commission on the European Democracy Action Plan (EDAP). We - signatories - call on the EU to take positive action to monitor and promote freedom of expression in all its forms and submit the following recommendations:
Over 250 European cultural leaders and arts organisations have signed an open letter - drafted by D6 Culture in Transit - urging the UK’s Secretary of State, Rt Hon Oliver Dowden to reverse the decision to take the UK out of Creative Europe, the EU’s funding programme for the cultural and creative sectors.
#Together4CreativeEurope
The project ‘Stories from the balcony, Stories from the Balkans’ by ATAK (Alternative Theatre Active Company) plans to organize, through a public call, a competition for unemployed, independent and all interested writers, primary playwrights from the Balkans, in the form of a short play. We interviewed Vasko Raicevic from ATAK to have an in-depth look at their project ‘Stories from the balcony, Stories from the Balkans’ and what topics these plays will touch on.
We interviewed our Culture of Solidarity grantee Csilla Hódi on her project Fair-y Circles and how it will provide practical knowledge of working with mushrooms (local food production, habitat restoration, eco-architecture) and mentoring for community and network development.
Today the EU Council meets as “the EU has called the Belarusian political leadership to participate in a genuine and inclusive dialogue with broader society to avoid further violence. The EU supports the Belarusian population in their desire for democratic change.” You can follow the video conference via this link.
We hope the outcomes will support the changes in Belarusian society now that the society experienced “a revolution in its mentality, a complete reboot of its thinking process,” as visual artist and writer Artur Klinaŭ had hoped for in his 2015 contribution to our Another Europe book.
“I do this trajectory almost daily, but now the uncanniness of the situation - this stranger that I just ‘met’, made me hyper-attentive of the public realm and the bizarre moment we’re all in. What struck me is the consciousness of my personal character, my social identity that is evoked by the other’s presence,” recalled a participant of silent walk in Brussels.
After the walk, a scripted conversation takes place and the participants are invited to record or write down their experiences. The feedbacks are then added to the project’s online Archive Of Solidarity, where fragments of these digitalized ‘analogue encounters’ are shown throughout the scope of the project. This is an existing, yet prototyped tool, that will be further developed the coming months.
“We have always been inspired by the idea of a network based on cities or towns rather than nations, connecting different territories with the same concerns as opposed to constructing relationships built only on the basis of the nation state,” say Aurora Adalid Núñez and Luis Galán of ZuloArk’s project ‘Universal Declaration of Urban Rights’.
Their European Parliament of Urban Rights takes the form of an online platform and a series of virtual encounters to compile, exchange, and learn from local innovations from throughout Europe.