Physical spaces for public debate

All across Europe, citizens of all backgrounds and cultures are organising their communities. They create spaces where culture works to strengthen social ties and helps to imagine alternative ways of living and engaging with others in understanding, trust and peace. ECF connects these spaces and thus helps to build a crucial infrastructure for a cultural movement that can reclaim European democracy.

VAHA

VAHA (meaning ‘oasis’ in Turkish) is a new two-year programme for cultural spaces of public discussion and free dialogue in Turkey and Europe. VAHA has been initiated by our Tandem Turkey partners Anadolu Kültür and MitOst. It strongly builds on previous work and programme communities in the region, and answers new challenges for independent voices and autonomously working cultural spaces in Turkey and around Europe.

In Turkey and Eastern Europe, independent cultural organisations and civil society initiatives are struggling to preserve a safe space for dialogue and freedom of expression. New local actors nevertheless try to provide and maintain unconventional (cultural) spaces and action for public programming and debate. Their efforts are a crucial source of inspiration and provide a spirit of endurance for their local public and civil society peers. They can function as veritable ‘oases’ (vaha in Turkish) that supply freedom of thought, open debate, creativity and human encouragement for the surrounding ecosystem of other independent cultural initiatives and local citizens.

Vaha – Oasis strengthens and increases the role such creative spaces can play inside different social, political, economic and cultural ecosystems. Over three years, this programme builds common ground and shares knowledge between autonomous cultural centers and civil initiatives. First locally, then regionally, then across Turkish, Eurasian and EU borders.

Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities

Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities (CCSC) is a joint project with ten partners across Europe that aims to increase citizen’s participation in the creation of cultural policies in cities. CCSC works on more sustainable and inclusive cities by making culture and creativity more central to policy-making by experimenting with participatory forms of cooperation between cultural organizations and policymakers.

Visit the website

Culture for Solidarity

The European Cultural Foundation, Rijeka 2020 European Capital of Culture, Krytyka Polityczna and ZEMOS98 invited everybody to apply for participation in Culture Lab Europe. The event was planned to take place in April in Rijeka, Croatia, but was postponed to June 2020 due to the Covid-19 crisis.

You can find the online programme, the participants, and background information here.

Culture lab Europe is part of the project Culture for Solidarity, a 2.5-year artistic investigation into the root causes of fragmentation in Europe. It is co-funded by the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme. The aim is to encourage greater solidarity, by highlighting cultural practices that bring unusual groups of people together, connecting these practices and scaling them across the continent.

Culture Lab Europe

Networked European Media

As part of the Initiative for European Public Space, ECF is building a coalition to shape a European media landscape. Together with journalists, researchers and concerned citizens, we are drawing and testing a blueprint for a networked European media model based on public values and independent from both market and government.

Digital European Public Spaces

Europe is facing real challenges in coping with market-driven and mainly non-European online platforms on which dis-/and misinformation and nationalistic tendencies easily grow and threaten democracy. There is no real European digital public space that is based on values of collaboration, sharing and safeguarding privacy and freedom of people.

Vision funds

Vision Funds are a placeholder for grants and pooled funding meant for ideas with potential; for responses to urgencies and for projects that make a real difference and imagine solutions.

ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture

For the last eleven years, the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture has honoured laureates as diverse as the cultural fields in which they work. They come from the performing and visual arts, literature, music, film, cultural activism, critical thinking, architecture, digital and media culture. Brilliant, innovative, daring, compassionate – these individuals and collectives have shone out in their resolve to find a better way, even in the face of global upheaval, and to shape a future that is more fair and respectful of both people and the planet that we share.

Connected Action for the Commons

Connected Action for the Commons was an action-research programme and network with six cultural organisations from across Europe and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) as collaborating hubs. Under the thematic focus Connecting Culture, Communities and Democracy we worked together with Connected Action for the Commons, a network and action research programme.

Idea Camp

The Idea Camp was a three-day incubator workshop for some of the most creative and adventurous ideas from across Europe and neighbouring countries, created by the Connected Action for the Commons Network.

Doc Next Network

ECF has been active in the field of young people and media for many years and specifically through the Youth and Media programme. In 2010, a new network called Doc Next Network sprung up out of this collaboration. Initiated and supported by ECF, the network aimed to create a vibrant European space where young people’s media messages are more accessible in mainstream public discourse.

European Neighbourhood programme

Read about ECF’s European Neighbourhood programme which has stimulated civil society working in culture to influence policy reform and societal development in the Balkans, Kaliningrad, Moldova, Turkey, the Ukraine and Arab-Mediterranean countries.

Trio

In 2011, ECF and Soros Foundation Moldova launched this two-year project in rural Moldova to improve conditions in small-scale local communities facing enormous challenges – growing poverty, high levels of youth unemployment, underdeveloped public services and social disintegration. The programme ran until December 2013.