The project structures workshops for artists and cultural workers in order to become empathic and resilient individuals so as to deal with the post-pandemic social and economic crisis. The cultivation of empathy is beneficial for artists at a professional level, since it enhances the ability to collaborate with others and reduces discriminatory stances, and at the personal level by improving self-awareness and resilience. 

The workshops are expected to facilitate creative discussions, the preparation, and implementation of the various sub-projects, and support informal learning through input from the European partners and the diversity of their approaches. 

Throughout the project lifetime, the following experiential and landmark workshops are envisaged to be implemented:  

EXPERIENTIAL WORKSHOPS 

LANDMARK WORKSHOPS 

OTHER WORKSHOPS 

During the project lifecycle, a number of residencies are envisaged to be organized and implemented across the countries of the consortium. 

Residencies will take place in: 

Italy, where participants will visit high and low pastures, walk across the mountains, attend dedicated lectures by specialists in the area, and be guided across the surrounding landscapes (natural and built), as well as offered the opportunity for site-specific investigations, 

Spain facilitating empathic and sustainable art creation through training with vulnerable groups for social inclusion and change,  

Bulgaria, where the residency focus will be given to the creation of a performative story, focusing on artists’ own resilience and sustainability, and 

Greece and particularly in Vorres Museum, taking advantage of its natural environment (a paradigm of Mediterranean gardening redefined in the light of climate change and sustainable approach). 

During each residency, participant artists will give a two-hour presentation of their work to the public and students on the last day of the residency.  

The residencies will offer the artists the chance to work with international collaborators (curators, cultural professionals) and make new work at their equipped venues. The residencies will culminate in the host partner presenting the work to the public. 

The residents will be selected through an open call. 

To further enhance audience participation, the project includes the initiation of 5 socially-engaged art interventions in five countries (Cyprus, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Greece). 

Each project partner will invite one established artist that works on this artistic genre, to collaborate with the organization and local people, communities and/or university students to initiate and implement a socially engaged art intervention, tackling specific problems related to sustainability and the promotion of circular economy practices. All the processes leading to the interventions will be documented and presented in short films in the project’s platform. 

The following socially-engaged art interventions are envisaged to be organized: 

Two partner organizations (Umetnostna Galerija Maribor and Vorres Museum) will creatively interact to implement two major artistic exhibitions, one held in Maribor, Slovenia, and one in Athens, Greece with the aim to address sustainability within an empathic and creative context. 

Curators from each museum will exchange knowledge, share ideas regarding the content of the exhibitions and the participant artists, and develop concepts and creative methods. The creative collaboration of the two museum organizations is expected to facilitate a curatorial discourse that visually emphasizes the use of an empathic approach to artistic practices, through painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, video art, and interactive computer art.