Creative Slovenia in 2017: a fascinating feat!
Since roughly the second half on the 1990s hundreds of cultural organisations from across Europe get to be annually united in a very special set of discursive and administrative protocols and rituals. Usually just before the deadline adding the final touches to their respective, often painstakingly compiled project propositions, they apply for funds from the European Union's cultural programme. As of 2014 this programme, bound to at least potentially boost their international fortunes, is known as Creative Europe.
Worth about a billion and a half euros and covering the period between 2014 and 2020, Creative Europe is – to put it briefly – a means to support the creation of a shared European cultural space and identity. It is divided into two sub-programmes, the film focused MEDIA, and the more diverse CULTURE, further partitioned into Literary Translations, European Platforms, European Networks and Cooperation Projects. It is especially through this latter one that Slovene cultural producers have recently been excelling with considerable panache. In fact, through an impressive performance of their application-genius, they have just managed to claim no less than 1,2 million of the roughly 35 million euros at stake for Cooperation Projects in 2017.
Natural born cultural managers?
Nevertheless, even such a performance was really only a minor surprise. When analysing the results of the previous years (2007–2011 and 2014–2015), Peter Inkei from the Budapest observatory stated in 2016 that »Slovenia is the incontestable east-central European champion in the Creative Europe programme«. He thus only reiterated himself when he recently, in May 2017, wrote that »the champion is again Slovenia with a 35% success rate«.
What he is referring to with the success rate in 2017 is that out of 20 projects with a Slovene 'leader' (the projects are comprised of one leading organisation and several partner ones), 7 managed to be successful in obtaining funds. The other 74 endorsed projects – chosen out of the 548 sent in – feature further 10 Slovene organisation as partners (which, between us, is often the preferable position in terms of the funds/responsibility trade-off). With all this in mind, Inkei rhetorically wonders if Slovenes are "born cultural managers". They might be, but more probably it is the complex historic composition of the Slovene cultural landscape (especially the NGO scene) that should offer interesting clues in this regard.
There is, however, one factor that seems to stand out fairly obviously as rather important. The Creative Europe Desk Slovenia (CED) is a small but dedicated and trusted NGO whose crew was, in a telling phrase that further elaborates Inkei's remark, recently labelled by one of the grant winning producers as "our mothers". Be that as it may, helping out the applicants with advice, workshops and other matters of general support, CED sports a systematic approach towards producing a community-based pool of skills, tricks, contacts, and the like. What it also does is an interoperability project, undertaken together with Culture.si and resulting in the interactive infographic bellow.
- Organisations by status
- Public
- Private
- Projects by field
- film and audiovisual projects
- interdisciplinary projects
- multimedia and new technologies
- books and reading / literary translation
- cultural heritage
- architecture, design and applied arts
- performing arts (theatre, dance, music)
- visual arts
- Organisation's role in the project
- beneficiary
- co-beneficiary
The infographic
The EU funding infographic features data that relates to EU funding for culture as a whole, encompassing the Culture 2007 and Culture 2000 schemes (these were preceded by some smaller programmes from the late 1990s) as well as the film and audiovisual media programmes (up until 2014 these were a separate entity known as MEDIA). At the moment only the results of the Cooperation Projects call are included in the 2017 row.
Each square represents one participant, linking to his profile on our portal, with the profile including a complete list of an organisation's European projects. Clicking on these projects will then take you to CED's webpage and the more in depth project descriptions found there. You can see the distribution of projects by art field, by the organisation's role in the project and – interestingly – by the organisation's status as either a public or a private entity.
Cooperation Projects recipients in 2017
Bellow is a list of the organisations that were successful in the Creative Europe Cooperation Projects call, as unveiled in May 2017. Their propositions are naturally very diverse, ranging from exploring the possibilities of technological advancements in puppetry as well as historic research on a certain family of baroque sculptors and painters.
While seven of the participating organisations hasn't had any prior experience in EU's cultural programmes, the same number of others are veterans with at least three or more projects behind their belt. What is somewhat striking in their composition is that public institutions have significantly boosted their Creative Europe profile, and have almost caught up with the previously much more industrious NGO sector.
- Aksioma Institute
- City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture
- Department of Art History, University of Ljubljana
- Federacija Institute
- Gallus Foundation
- Goga Publishing House
- House! Society for People and Spaces
- Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia, Maribor Regional Office
- Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture
- Ljubljana Puppet Theatre
- Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory
- Maribor Art Gallery
- Moderna galerija (MG)
- MoTA Museum of Transitory Art
- Pionirski dom Youth Culture Centre
- Sodobnost International Cultural Society
- Technical Museum of Slovenia
See also
- Creative Europe Desk Slovenia
- A list of ALL Slovene organisations ever funded by the Culture and MEDIA Programmes
External links
- April 2017 news from the Budapest Observatory, commenting on the Creative Europe Collaboration Projects 2017 results
- May 2016 news from the Budapest Observatory, also commenting on the Creative Europe Collaboration Projects 2016 results
- "The Story of 751 Bonds", a research paper on partnerships in EU-financed cultural projects, 2007-2011 and 2014-2015
- EU funding for culture? 4 observations from Slovenia, a blog post by Culture.si and Creative Europe Desk Slovenia
<small class="imgdesc">The infographic featuring the international impact of 18 successful producers from Slovenia who have received the Creative Europe funds in 2020 for cooperation with 94 partners from 24 countries!ration with 94 partners from 24 countries! +
