Governance

The Partners

is a Paris-based organisation with an outreach office in Marseille dedicated to identifying and providing support to artists in exile of all origins and all disciplines. The aa-e provides work spaces and counseling to over 300 members based on the artists’ social and artistic needs, and connects them to French and European professional networks. The agency works with a wide array of tools and activities in collaboration with culture professionals, lawyers, health professionals and social workers: individual follow-up meetings, language courses, training, workshops, master classes, residency programs, and much more.

is an Italian platform for international and groundbreaking performing arts, an artistic residency for contemporary theatre and dance. Running since 1971, the Festival has become an important cultural hub and a leader in the international art scene. Together with a radical programme, it transforms the town of Santarcangelo in Northern Italy for 10 days, creating an unique and immersive atmosphere and building a temporary community of artists, citizens and spectators who gather around contemporary creation. The Festival activities unfold continuously throughout the year, organising gatherings and events aimed at nurturing the local community through sustainable, global, accessible and post-disciplinary practices.

is a Nicosia-based non-profit organisation, working in the field of visual arts and community peacebuilding. More specifically, Visual Voices programs are designed for young visual artists interested in developing or continuing with socially engaged artistic practices. Their methodology is built around three key pillars: artist in residence programs, non-commercial platforms of expression, and community partnerships. Together these elements create space for dialogue and new perspectives around pressing social challenges.

is a Lisbon-based performing arts organisation dedicated to supporting artists and audiences in engaging with critical ideas in arts and society. Its annual festival — Alkantara Festival — brings people together for dance, theatre, live performance, parties, and conversations around the work of artists from Portugal and abroad. Like its predecessor Danças na Cidade, the festival coproduces and presents Portuguese and international artists of different generations and is an important meeting place for arts professionals. Year-round, Espaço Alkantara is a place for residencies and research, meetings, workshops, and other public programmes.

The mentors

is a choreographic and imagery artist, researcher of Afro-diasporic and urban dances, extemporary dancer and pedagogue, her practices are woven through the act of traveling. Her work is situated among the notions of transit, displacement, belonging, superposition, memory, colors and ordinary gestures.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, growing up in Kabul, Delhi, and Berlin. Her work engages with mechanisms of remembrance, the search for identity, and the social and cultural processes associated with them.

searches an original musical expression of her voice and her instrument the Oud and explores new spaces and horizons for her notes and words through the various projects she realizes.

(Eritrea 1978) lives and works in Bologna. Gesture, vision and word are her elements. Her work investigates stage and performing arts languages in order to shape the tension resulting from dif-ferent expressive poles: private and public, memory and oblivion, visible and invisible.

is a dancer, choreographer and artistic director of the Libr’Arts company, born in Ivory Coast and based in Montpellier. Blurring borders and expectations, her work, often very physical, relentlessly questions identities, assignations and margins. Her work, as physical as it is committed, has never ceased to question questions of margins, belonging and assignment, always with the question of the body at the centre.

is a director and theatre-maker from South Africa, living in Bern. As an ever-evolving artist, she collaborates on diverse projects to impact cultural practice on multiple levels and promote inclusivity.

The individual experts

is a curator based in Milan. Eva is concerned with the questions of freedom and focuses her practice on exploring these questions across performing art, politics and sexuality. At the moment, she is co-curating Samara Editions and serves as artistic advisor for SPIELART Theaterfestival in Munich.

is an Iranian artist based in Paris. As a queer woman, her work previously reflected her experience as a marginalized subject in post-revolution Iran. From 2009-2011, she lived in Malaysia to pursue a Master’s program, guiding her practice toward a research-based pursuit. She moved to Kenya in 2012 where her practice was deeply influenced by colonial and post-colonial realities, focusing on human rights, the queer community, and the representation of women in African oral traditions. Since 2018, she has been based in France where she currently explores identity and the influences of identity politics on artistic practice. Her work is part of several collections including the World Bank Washington and Absa’s permanent collection in South Africa. She is the overall winner of the Absa L’atelier competition 2017.

is a Syrian architect and multidisciplinary artist based in Marseille. Through the alias KhAl, his creative practice focuses on visual art via photography, video art, theatre scenography, performance, and multimedia installations. He is the co-founder and creative director of UV LAB design studio.

is a Syrian-born Berlin-based conceptual artist, cultural activist, and creative facilitator. He is also founder of coculture, a nonprofit organisation rooted in the intersectionality between art, activism, and community-building to support exiled culture and cultural producers.

The associaded experts

promotes inclusion and cohesion in the region of Bologna. Founded in 2013, the Abantu cooperative focuses on developing support activities for migrants such as consultancies services on immigration law, job coaching and linguistic-cultural mediation.

is a not-for-profit organisation which aims at promoting access (physical, social, intellectual) to cultural participation. One of Acesso Cultura’s main objectives is to contribute to the technical preparation of culture professionals in what concerns access to culture.

is a non-for-profit organisation, that strives to safeguard, support and advocate for the rights of refugees, asylum seekers, detainees, trafficking victims and survivors of torture, in Cyprus.

is the National Choreographic Development Centre of Val-de Marne, a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to promote choreographic creation and artistic development through co-productions, studio space, artist residencies and transnational programs.

is the first and only national theatre in France devoted to choreographic art. Chairman and Artistic director Rachid Ouramdane intends Chaillot to be a Theatre of Diversity, a place for social innovation through arts and culture mindful of environmental issues.

Contacts

Aura Burzynski — cooperation@aa-e.org
France

Chiara Fabene — creativeeurope@santarcangelofestival.com
Italy

Alden Jacobs — contact@visual-voices.org
Cyprus

Ionara Silva — ionara@alkantara.pt
Portugal