Creative Europe in Slovenia: Bunker – Co-shaping the International Performing Arts Scene
Bunker – Co-shaping the International Performing Arts Scene
Bunker Institute’s practice has, from its very inception, been profoundly shaped by the vision of its founder, Nevenka Koprivšek, oriented towards internationalisation and long-term international collaboration. Ever since European funding became available to Slovenian applicants, even before Slovenia’s accession to the European Union in 2004, Bunker has been continuously embedded in European projects. This kind of support has crucially strengthened its international orientation – from the Mladi levi Festival and, later, the Drugajanje Festival, to significant international co-productions, for example with Rimini Protokoll, and collaborations with numerous artistic organisations across Europe.
The most transformative European project for Bunker Institute was Create to Connect, along with its continuation, Create to Impact. This was not necessarily because it was the largest (although it was indeed substantial, involving around fifteen partners) but because, after several years of participating in Creative Europe in a partner role, it was we at Bunker who led this project – and for nine years at that. It empowered us in the roles of mediators, leaders, and connectors, while also enriching us with knowledge, experience, and a deeper insight into the artistic and production practices of colleagues across Europe, as well as into varied approaches to community engagement, whether within artistic projects or as part of audience outreach. The partnerships we established have remained alive beyond the project’s conclusion; to this day, we continue to collaborate in various, sometimes unexpected ways, both with organisations and with the individuals we connected with.
Although limited to Europe, Creative Europe has nonetheless largely enabled collaborations beyond the borders of the European Union. It has offered us a welcome opportunity to bring more intensively into our networks, partnerships, co-productions, exchanges, and cognitive maps of cultural environments those cultural landscapes that had previously sat on the margins of our maps – not for lack of interest, but because of the circumstances that shape our actual possibilities for collaboration. And so it was that at the Mladi levi Festival in 2025, we welcomed a colleague from Georgia who had joined us in the Create to Impact project as far back as 2018. And just yesterday, partners from the Netherlands informed us that they would be visiting her in Georgia as part of a study visit by Dutch theatres.
Looking to the present and the future, our hope – and indeed our aspiration – is that the most transformative European project for Bunker will be Festival SPA. We believe it has the potential to reshape first us and our partners, and then perhaps the wider sector as well. The project opens up space for reflection on degrowth, rest, pleasure, joy, and wellbeing. In this context, three festivals – Mladi levi, Homo Novus, and Santarcangelo – are jointly exploring festival practices through which festivals might be made more hospitable to all those they touch: artists, workers, audiences, and local communities. Rather than acceleration, constant new production, and an ever-increasing pace, we are seeking models that deepen existing processes, strengthen wellbeing and flourishing, and sometimes simply slow our lives down a little, creating space for pause and rest.
As projects of this kind require stable support at the European level, our main wish for the future of the Creative Europe programme is clear: more support. The arts sector, particularly the performing arts – which we know best and in which we work – is in exceptionally good shape; yet the available support often does not fully reflect this. The low proportion of funded projects means that success is no longer determined solely by the quality of applications, partnerships, and content, but also by luck. A programme that was conceived as a stable support mechanism for international collaboration is thus becoming increasingly out of reach for many. The allocation of certain forms of support – mobility funding, for example – is being delegated to large national or network organisations, which introduces yet another intermediary layer.
We wish Creative Europe the strongest possible position within the family of European funding programmes, and vehement advocates who will fight for the sector – as the Creative Europe Desk Slovenia fights for us. Within the programme itself, we believe it is important to further broaden the circle of participating countries and to provide more targeted support for collaboration with the Western Balkans (a single targeted call has already demonstrated that the need and interest are exceptional) and with countries that are still candidates for EU membership. At the same time, we would welcome a return to a model in which cultural funding within European programmes was not primarily aimed at the direct implementation of EU policies, but instead at supporting approaches more firmly grounded in artistic content, rather than in pursuing various corrective mechanisms through art and culture.
For Bunker, which has operated internationally since its inception, Creative Europe – and European funding for the arts and culture more broadly – is of vital importance. It is precisely for this reason that we hope it will remain one of the key programmes providing the cultural sector with support that is as broad, as long-term, and as high in quality as possible.
See also
- Bunker Institute
- Creative Europe Desk Slovenia
- Mateja Lazar, Nika Mušič and Sabina Briški Karlić: Creative Europe 2024. Slovenia’s Imprint on the European Cultural Space
- Mateja Lazar: The First Decade of the EU Creative Europe Programme