Trajectories

1. Art and citizenship: How can art better support practicing citizenship together?

Within the dominant contemporary art practices, the roles of artists as producers and audiences as consumers is strictly defined . However, there are artists and arts organizations which create alternative ways to connect with their audiences as committed and engaged citizens. In order to do this, a different type of actions and skills are needed requiring both the artist and the audience to become active citizens. There are many existing initiatives, but they are mainly local, weak and small-scale. How can international cooperation connect and strengthen these models, how can they have bigger impact and become more mainstream?

2. Fair governance models: How to make open, inclusive and flexible governance models?

Collectives, informal and/or temporary partnerships, self-organization / self-management and inclusive governance are different organizational trends which abandon hierarchical organizational models and methods. Its purpose is to make decision-making and implementation more respectful of humanistic values and needs of arts engagement in society today. What and how can we learn from these new models? What social, ethical and cultural aspects of these models can we keep and cherish on a transnational and transregional level?

3. Value of art in social fabric: How to encourage understanding of and promote the value of art in social fabric?

For the lack of a more effective method, the value of contemporary art is often reduced to visible results or products. Processes developed by artistic practices mainly end up to be invisible or unrecognized so the audiences and decision-makers often don’t recognize the importance and the value of arts in society. How to better understand the influence of the artists and their work in the local context, urban or rural? How to encourage and support practices which create intangible value for society?

4. Solidarity funding: How can solidarity funding encourage the vitality of contemporary arts in these uncertain times?

Due to changing historical, cultural, political and economic factors, not all Europeans can cooperate within Europe in the same way (presenting, for example, German work in France is easy because of institutional support, while presenting work from Albania in Croatia is almost impossible, due to lack of institutional support). Also, because of unstable political and social situation (political shifts leading to funding cuts, censorship, migration of artists and cultural workers due to political instability), funding institutions get stuck within their working frameworks and often don’t respond quickly enough to these unexpected circumstances. How to support art projects based on their artistic and collaborative potential rather than where they come from? How to create conditions and models which tackle the inequality of access to mobility and funding? How to make sure the unfunded (and thus virtually impossible) projects get funding and support?

5. Transnational / postnational artistic practices: What framework and tools do artists working transnationally need and how to provide them?

Contemporary art practices are increasingly mobile: they develop, produce and present their work sometimes in multiple countries at the same time, e.g. an artist can be born in one country, live in another, be resident of a third and have work produced in the fourth. However, existing administrative structures (companies, production offices, agents, unions…) following national arts policies are unable to respond to this new need of developing a transnational artistic path. Everyone gladly claims an artist as their own, but no one wants to create conditions to ensure his transnational mobility. How to bridge this gap? How to create conditions for the mobility of all artists who choose to work transnationally, not only the happy few who have been noticed by international networks?