Mobility funding supports new perspectives and experiments

The second round of Mobility funding for the travel/stay of artists and others, who are also professionally involved in arts and culture within the Nordic and Baltic region, has just been distributed. Nordic Culture Point has received a total of 254 applications, of which 71 were granted support to strengthen the conditions for cultural and artistic cooperation in the Nordic-Baltic region. A total sum of 140 390 EUR was distributed.

Among the granted projects – a Nordic initiative to create The Silent University North, an autonomous knowledge platform for asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people inspired by the Silent University project initiated in London in 2012 by the Kurdish artist Ahmet Ögüt. This Nordic network will consist of the Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki), The Workers’ Educational Association (Stockholm) and CKI – Danish Center for Art and Interculture (Copenhagen) and will be run by freelance curators and producers, who is going to meet in order to develop their plans. They express a worry to see how migrants and refugees are used as battering ram in political campaigns in a time of austerity and crisis. According to them, it is leading to a dehumanization of refugees, reducing migrants to an impersonal mass. ‘In a politically turbulent time where populist and racist forces are blowing across Europe and the Nordic countries, it is important for cultural workers to create networks and produce knowledge exchange to navigate these situations. We believe that art has an important and unique possibility to create another angle on this subject’, they stress.

Susanne Rosenberg is a professor and a one of Sweden’s foremost folk singers today, who is together with other skilled singers is going to travel to Sommelo festival in Kuhmo, Finland. The main idea behind the project is to meet singers from Finland and Sweden, get inspired by each other’s culture and create new songs together using improvisation as the basic tool. They are going to mix different music traditions – narrative singing in Sweden e.g. medieval ballads and the narrative singing in Finland e.g. Runo-singing (Kalevala) and Medieval ballads (Finnish-Swedish tradition) to create new songs. Developing new songs based on old ones is, according to Rosenberg, ‘an essential part of the tradition‘. Moreover, singers will meet narrative singers from Great Britain and Russia, which will also lead to new experiments and emergence of new music.

Mobility funding is a part of the programme of the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture that aims to promote mobility as an important instrument to strengthen the conditions for cultural and artistic cooperation in the Nordic-Baltic region. The funding is provided for travel and/or accommodation cost in the Nordic Region and the Baltic states for up to ten days and is granted either to private persons or small groups.

The next application round for the programme opens on the 23rd of July and closes on the 22nd of August 2018 at 15:59 Finnish time. Please read more about the Mobility funding programme here.