CURRENT INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS

Project partners, including Bunker, gathered to continue Beyond Front@, a highly successful European dance network project supported by the Culture Programme of EU a decade ago. The previous project resulted in the desire to further develop the collaboration with new focus, new activities and new partners, and enhance the capacity building and collaborative approaches in the Central European region. Built on the previous outcomes and practices, the new edition titled Beyond Front@ – Bridging Periphery focuses on the peripheral situation of the dance actors in the Central European countries, covering a wider range of partners. All partners committed to foster local development of the contemporary dance production and all devoted to overcoming obstacles in their specific contexts by increasing mutual cooperation. Three main areas of action to be tackled in the project Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery: collaborative strategies, capacity building and sustainable cultural production in the region. Its priorities are supporting training, greater synergies, and the enhancement of regional visibility. The partnership also defined three main interconnected topics that define the project’s vision and mission for the three years, as overarching themes for critics, professionals and academics: VIRTUAL-INTERACTIVE-SITE SPECIFIC.

More about the project …

Throughout the project we will publish several different tenders or calls for participation for dance artists, critics, experts in the field of performing arts, and co-organize residencies for young dance critics and for young dancers and workshops for producers, artists and other workers in the field of performing arts.

Open calls …

Cross-disciplinary research platform “Performing Landscape” will allow us to conceive at European level an artistic event relevant to local contexts called Shared Landscapes. This artistic event curated by Stefan Kaegi (co-founder of Lead partner Rimini Protokoll) and Caroline Barneaud (curator and producer made available by Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne as part of the partnership) will be prototyped and implemented in 6 different European green peripheral areas by the consortium members.
It will be presented 42 times in total in the frame of Performing Landscape.

The local and European levels, the social, economic and environmental issues, the transformative power of art: building up a European “research platform” based on the diverse local resources of each partner and territory, designing a prototype with European artists and professionals, and implementing it locally, disseminating the results locally and internationally. And thus, it reduces the environmental impact of an international art project and increases its local economic, social and cultural impacts, encouraging its greater appropriation by the local populations and in particular those of the green peripheries and the materialisation of a European space, transforming our practices with innovative projects and inspiring all the stakeholders and other artists and institutions.

The project will be developed by the European partners and curators in partnership with scientists, theatre
experts, artists, local partners from different countries in the research phase. All partners will be involved in
the whole creation process: from local and global research and conception to the local implementation, to
the global and local dissemination.

Stronger Peripheries: A Southern Coalition is a project created to open a space for dialogue, collaboration, and joint learning, to question and discuss the notions of “south” and “peripheries” from a socio-political and socio-cultural perspective through diverse collaborative artistic strategies capacity-building actions.

The project wants to provide the opportunities to rethink our identities through culture and the empowering confluence of cultural difference, while promoting reflection on prevailing cultural policy models in the South of Europe.

The Southern Coalition is an informal network that gathers eleven arts management organizations and three research institutions from ten European countries. A network that connects locally anchored cultural practices, aiming at overcoming isolation and boosting the skills of artists, cultural professionals, and audiences.

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ACT : Art, Climate, Transition (ACT) is a European cooperation project on hope.
Yet: ours is an age of climate breakdown, mass extinction and loss of biodiversity. Ours is an Europe of increasing populist and nationalist tendencies. These realities are not separated, but closely interconnected.

We step into this field and connect the arts to what we see as the most urgent agenda today: act, towards a just transition. ACT emerges from the cultural operators of Imagine2020, raising awareness on the climate crisis, and presenting the arts as a strong designer of possible futures. Now it is a just transition which is urgently needed: a transition that is based on our ethical awareness and ecological understanding of interaction between species, humans and their political and natural environments.

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IETM – International network for contemporary performing arts is one of the oldest and largest international cultural networks, representing the voice of over 500 performing arts organisations and individual professionals working in the contemporary performing arts worldwide.

PAST INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS

Create to Connect -> Create to Impact (CtC -> CtI) is a continuation of the Create to Connect (CtC) project which started in 2013 as a joint effort of ten European cultural organizations (and three associate partners) to create powerful and long-lasting connections of artists, cultural operators, researchers and audience; seeking new production models for engaging the audience in new, innovative ways; and creating together new public arenas through dialogue and participation.

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trans-making is a transdisciplinary approach / intersectoral dialogue with different fields of the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and stakeholders in the art and creative fields on the other. trans-making connects more than 20 partners from different European and Non-European countries (China, Morocco, Egipt, Cuba, Chile …).

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Balkan Express is a network where cultural experts and integrated socially engaged practices join forces to mobilize the cultural sector in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe as well as beyond, to encourage the exchange and collaboration and, finally, to develop sincere supporting relations between culture and society.

Meeting Flanders – Balkan Express, 2017 – video

Caucasus – Balkan Express, 2015 – publication

Balkan Express Reader, 2014 – publication

More information here.

Imagine 2020 (2.0) is a project of 10 EU based arts organisations, funded by Creative Europe, with a focus on raising awareness in the cultural field and in a broader civil society context around the issues of the socio-ecological crisis that we are currently facing. It funds artistic commissions, research and development and promotes the sharing of resources, ideas, knowledge and debate across the various topics under the umbrella of art and ecology.

Imagine 2020 (2.0) developped from the Imagine 2020 Network, which researched new ways of producing and presenting exciting artworks with minimal environmental impact, and shares its learning in order to get the European cultural sector as a whole to include climate change concerns in their everyday working practice.

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Create to Connect  is a joint effort of 13 European cultural and research organizations to create powerful and long-lasting connections of artists, cultural operators, researchers and audience. The partners’ organizations have made commitment to several years researching and finding new approaches to educate the audience as well as the production models that will engage the audience in new innovative ways and trying to create new public arenas together with the audience, whether it be physically, through dialogue or participation. The project runs from 1st September 2013 to 31st August 2018, its coordinator is Bunker, Ljubljana.

RESHAPE is a research and development project that brings together arts organisations from the Europe and the South Mediterranean to jointly create innovative organisational models and reflect on concrete answers to crucial challenges related to the production, distribution and presentation of contemporary art practices.

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From 2012 onwards, the Drugajanje festival is part of the network entitled Festivals in Transition. Thirteen of its partners are involved in the project  URBAN HEAT, which is a project supported by Creative Europe, enabling artists to engage with the invisible communities within cities. The four year project supports artists to develop and create daring and extraordinary work that connects with the world outside the arts by addressing urgent political and social issues, and by working with audiences and communities affected by those issues. The Slovene artist taking part in the project is director Mare Bulc.

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Project 3C 4 Incubators – Culture, Creative and Clusters for Incubators (3C 4 Incubators) represents a continuation of the Sostenuto project. 3C 4 Incubatora intents to contribute to the promotion of cultural and creative sector as a factor of territorial development and economic and social innovation. The project runs from September 2013 to January 2015 and is supported by European Regional Development Fund.

  • VO-BI – a guide through bureaucracy
  • 3C 4 Incubators lecture and a workshop for creatives

The project Sostenuto aims at reinforcing the competitiveness and the capacities of economic and social innovation from the cultural and creative sector in the Med space by accompanying its transformation towards new economic and social models.

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IDENTITY.MOVE! offers a transnational platform for theoretical and artistic research in the field of contemporary dance and related performing arts focusing on the ‘Eastern Belt’ of Europe.

In the project Sites of Imagination (2007), an international multidisciplinary group of choreographers, theatre artists, architects and theoreticans together were exploring the Mediterranean city and created a multi-image artistic creation on the theme of the relation between body and city. Slovenia was represented by Mala Kline with the performance DÉBUT – In Memory of Coming.

The Lionhearted will ignite and support the international breakthrough of emerging European contemporary performing artists through creating a platform of 20 arts organizations. Bunker, Ljubljana (with a rich history of supporting emerging artists) chose 20 arts organizations from Europe – with special attention to the outskirts of Europe –  that have experience in supporting emerging artists and fostering arts cooperation beyond borders.

Emerging artists are not defined merely as young, but we will create an antipode to the current arts system that either perpetually supports the big, recognized names or young, cheap, inexperienced, precarious artists, shoving them into the arena and spitting them out if they do not instantly succeed. We will support artists that have proven successful but have not had a major international breakthrough yet and for whom programmers believe could have meaningful impact also to audiences outside their national context.

All member organizations will host or tour emerging artists and with the support of the platform not only enable “the move” across borders, but also the back-up: besides covered expenses (fee, travel, subsistence) also promotion, audience building and positioning in a bigger picture – the Liohearted.