Partners Circle

Partners Circle

LAVANDERIA A VAPORE

This Dancehouse in Collegno, near Turin, grew into a research centre for contemporary artistic experimentation. Its work starts from dance, but moves beyond the stage: dance becomes a way to read the present through bodies, relations, emotions and shared experience.

Lavanderia a Vapore is conceived as a protected and permeable space, built through relationships. It opens itself to different voices, cross-sector collaborations and territorial involvement, working with choral forms, collective practices and visions rooted in the urgencies of civil society.

Through projects, residencies, public programmes and moments of presentation, Lavanderia a Vapore tests how artistic experience and imagination can enter processes of social transformation. It works as a threshold space: a place where artists can develop their practice, where the unnoticed can emerge, and where relations between art and civil society can be rethought.

Its programme generates questions, alliances and common ground around possible futures shaped by equity, collaboration and sustainability.

Within On Mobilisation. Towards Multivocal Collaborative Futures, Lavanderia a Vapore is a lead partner and focuses on Critical Imagination, co-creating speculative artistic tools that softly influence institutional and systemic change toward care-based, community-rooted practices.

BALTIC ART CENTER

Baltic Art Center (BAC) is one of Sweden’s most prominent residencies and has been based on Gotland since 2001. They are an internationally established meeting place in the Baltic region, connecting artists and organisations from all over the world.

BAC is committed to a sustainable society, diversity of artistic practices and cultural exchange within the arena of international contemporary art. It works with artists and cultural practitioners to develop, produce and present ground-breaking artistic projects. BAC collaborates via regional, national and international networks and is amongst other things, a founding member of the Swedish Artist Residency Network.

BAC is a small and dynamic art institution with offices and guest accommodation in the heart of Visby, a medieval town on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

They are a flexible organisation that supports the artistic process and tailors its approach to suit specific art projects. BAC provides artists with the time, space and resources to work individually and collaboratively to develop new ideas and art projects, and invites them to use the whole island as an extended studio to explore and connect to different places and local communities.

The island has had strategic military importance in the Baltic Sea for most of its history. During the 20th century the military was stationed on Gotland as part of Sweden’s defence system, until all permanent military units were shut down in 2005. The military infrastructure was abandoned or given to cultural organisations. With tensions in Northeastern Europe and Russia escalating in 2014-2015, the Swedish government remilitarized the island, and as of 2018 Gotland has re-raised the Gotland Regiment. The case for a peace movement on the island has also gained momentum, balancing the military build-up taking place with bottom-up peace-building activities.

Within this project, Baltic Art Center focuses on Visual Literacy, collectively co-developing tools to navigate, decode and co-create in today’s AI-influenced visual culture, while becoming critical digital citizens.

OUT OF SIGHT

Out of Sight is a non-profit venue for contemporary art based in Antwerp, founded in 2018 by artists Dušica Dražić and Wim Janssen. The organisation operates at the intersection of artistic research and presentation, social engagement, and civic participation, positioning art as a shared space for inquiry, learning, and collective imagination. Out of Sight fosters a collaborative approach to supporting the development through presentation and mediation of audiovisual, experimental, and time-based artistic practices.

The organisation contributes to a cultural landscape in which diverse forms of knowledge, expression, and belonging are recognised, shared, and valued, and where artistic practice functions as a connective tissue between communities, generations, and disciplines.

Out of Sight aims to find a potential hidden within what is often perceived as different, marginal, unprofitable, or unwanted, making room for the ephemeral and the ambiguous. It provides a space where the poetic and the political meet. It creates accessible and inclusive cultural spaces where artists, cultural workers, residents, and civil society actors can meet as co-creators rather than passive audiences. Particular attention is given to groups that face structural barriers to cultural participation.

The organisation works with low-threshold, free, and locally embedded formats such as public programmes (exhibitions, performances, cinemas, multidisciplinary festivals), residencies and workshops. These function as intergenerational and transdisciplinary spaces where artistic experimentation, embodied knowledge, and lived experience are valued equally. 

By connecting local realities in Antwerp with transnational networks, Out of Sight contributes to a diverse and socially engaged cultural ecosystem, strengthening culture’s role in democratic resilience.

As its research strand within the On Mobilisation project, Out of Sight focuses on New Forms of Social Realism in Contemporary Artistic Production, examining tensions between opposing ideological forces and tracing how historical continuities and ruptures have shaped contemporary class structures, land and human bodies.

DIVADLO X10

Founded in 2013 and based in the historic Art Industry Building in Prague’s downtown since 2017, Divadlo X10 has evolved into one of the largest and most recognized non-profit NGO platforms within the Czech independent performing arts scene. As an open, multigenerational creative community and the recipient of the “Theatre of the Year 2023” award, X10 hosts over 250 events annually, including more than six premieres and extensive international touring. The platform aims to foster critical, independent thinking by combining its resident ensemble—celebrated for its collective, gender-fluid, and socially engaged contemporary drama—with a robust co-production house supporting diverse artistic disciplines. Reflecting urgent global issues from political radicalization to the climate crisis, X10’s strategic vision leading up to 2030 emphasizes sustainable European and Euro-Asian partnerships. This includes its 2026 programming, highlighted by transnational productions and the Kutná Hora Performing Arts Festival, an annual showcase of original works from Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe, all while actively working to reduce labor precarity in the cultural sector.

Y Events, established in 2019 as a programming line within Divadlo X10, works between performing arts, visual arts and contemporary theory. Its long-durational events bring together live art, installations, video games, participatory formats and public discussions around ecology, feminism, technology and decolonisation.

Through the On Mobilisation project, Y Events focuses on Redefinition of Success, researching how culture could contribute to the prevention of mental health issues and to the enhancement of both individual and collective well-being.

BLOK

Founded in 2001, BLOK is a curatorial collective working on the democratisation of culture and art. Its mission is to act as a generator of continuous politicization of the cultural artistic sphere, to produce the critique of capitalism and research possible alternatives through means of art and culture.

BLOK’s work brings together socially engaged artistic practices, publishing, political and artistic education, and the organising of cultural workers in the struggle for better working conditions. Since 2016, they have run BAZA, a space for art and activism in Trešnjevka, the largest neighbourhood in Zagreb, shaped by a rich industrial history and strong tradition of workers’ resistance and collective organising.

Through long term work in local contexts, including the Trešnjevka Neighbourhood Museum, BLOK connects artistic practice with community life, collective memory and socially engaged forms of participation. The backbone of the Trešnjevka Neighbourhood Museum program is an online collection of items connected to the pre 2000 history of the neighborhood, collected in close collaboration with its former and current inhabitants. This material is then used as a starting point for diverse artistic and cultural projects: research based commissions, cinema sessions, thematic exhibitions, guided tours, podcasts, publications etc.

An important part of BLOK’s work is education and advocacy around better working conditions in the field of arts and culture. What first appeared as a topic dealt with within Political school for artists (and all interested…) – a program which we started in 2016 and are finding ways to keep it going – soon became an educational program of its own: Applause won’t cover the rent. Through lectures and workshops, in close collaboration with Croatian Screenwriters and playwrights guild SPID, we work with cultural workers of different disciplines and backgrounds on the practice and theory behind workers’ organizing in a field still marked by concepts of inspiration, geniality and talent and autonomy.

BLOK’s contribution to the On Mobilisation project focuses on Socially Engaged Approach to Heritage, activating it through micro-community participation and contribution to the Trešnjevka Neighbourhood Museum.