Festival SPA joins together three arts organizations with renowned, vibrant, summer contemporary performing arts festivals: Santarcangelo festival (IT), Mladi levi festival (SI) and Homo Novus festival (LV). These festivals have a tradition of care for the wellbeing of artists, cultural workers and have already paved ways of reaching out to audiences and making festivals welcoming spaces. We want to develop the framework within festivals to further contribute to improving mental health, wellbeing and social inclusion of festival workers and audiences. We will create safe, soft, slow spaces and conditions that will nurture the people working for the festivals and all the audiences in order to be able to savor art slowly and improve our living.

Team of curators, producers, artists and experts will research the needs of the festival workers and targeted audiences in the field of social inclusion, mental health and wellbeing in order to respond with organizational changes, production innovations and artistic-led practices.

Festival SPA will commission and invite works of art that deal with temporality to slow down the experience of art, we will invite artists to create gestures of care for the audience and design festival centers as spas: spaces of rest, tranquility, recuperation, relaxation and healing. All festivals will devise parties as curated artistic events that cater to the specific needs of the audiences. The collaboration of the festivals will be on all levels: production, curation, exchange of artistic work and on slow and caring exchange among us; to visit each other’s festivals, learn and care for each other.

Festivals have a great potential of creating temporary communities and utopias where we can reimagine cultural production, venues and also artistic practices as in a laboratory. The Festival SPA expert team will monitor, evaluate and create recommendations, so we can take new practices further into new festivals, seasons, the whole sector and beyond.