"Homefront Affairs: Artists' engagement in times of war", Cultural Agency "Liniya Vtechi", Ukraine

"Homefront Affairs: Artists’ Engagement in Times of War" empowers Ukrainian artists to engage with vulnerable communities through art practices, fostering inclusive recovery and long-term collaboration across cultural and civic sectors.

Through a trauma-informed, two-month educational program that combines psychological training, artistic mentoring, and community engagement, the project equips artists with the tools and knowledge to design and implement socially engaged art projects.

The program will run in five waves throughout 2026, each involving lectures, field visits to partner institutions, and artist residencies at the Lviv Municipal Art Center. Selected participants will co-create art interventions in collaboration with local communities and support organizations.

The project’s final phase includes a design-thinking workshop, public presentation, and the creation of a best practices catalogue to be disseminated among institutions and NGOs across Ukraine. A network of trained artists and partnering organizations will be established, ensuring lasting impact after the project.

© Photo: Volodymyr Voznyy

"Queer Freedom, NOMANTINELS, Slovakia

Theatre has always been a space for imagining new realities. Queer Freedom builds on this tradition, reimagined through a radical queer lens. This experimental performance responds to the emotional, social, and political precarity faced by LGBTI+ people in Slovakia and Central Europe. Inspired by findings from the 2025 Queer Vibes survey—where 76% of LGBTI+ respondents felt rejected by society the project seeks to transform trauma into collective healing and hope.

At its heart is Trauma Anatomy, an immersive theatrical experience blending live acting, movement, poetic language, and therapeutic storytelling. Surreal scenography and absurd humor evoke the fragmented nature of trauma while inviting audiences to reflect and interact. This isn’t just theatre, it’s a ritual of resilience.

Target audience includes LGBTI+ individuals especially youth, trans and nonbinary people, and those in rural areas as well as parents and relatives seeking to better understand their loved ones. The project also engages allies, educators, mental health professionals, and general audiences open to exploring queer realities in nuanced, intimate ways.

Led by NOMANTINELS with partners like Cultural Centre P*AKT, Queer Freedom fosters connection and visibility, offering tools for replication and long-term cultural impact.

© Photo: Jakub Kováč

"KomshiLOOK Zhelezara: A neighborhood in three Acts", KomshiLOOK Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia

KomshiLOOK Zhelezara: A Neighborhood in Three Acts is a two-day, site-specific cultural festival that transforms a block of six cascading 1980s residential buildings in Skopje into an open-air stage for opera, film, and community-led events. This rare modernist structure - now surrounded by unplanned urban development :/ becomes both backdrop and protagonist in a celebration of overlooked architecture and civic life.

Building on a successful 2024 pilot, the 2026 edition introduces a full narrative experience: a reimagined version of La Traviata performed in three acts (30–20–30 minutes) across three locations within the block. The opera retains its original libretto but is adapted to local context—a gossiping neighbor replaces the strict father, and the tragic ending becomes a wedding celebration. As the audience moves with the story, the music evolves from classical to Macedonian evergreens, folklore, brass bands, and techno-folk dance fusion.

Between acts, visitors engage with exhibitions, film screenings, dinners, and workshops scattered throughout the neighborhood. On the second day, residents host a communal breakfast and public reflection. With neighbors as hosts, performers, and co-creators, KomshiLOOK reclaims everyday space for culture offering a living model for participation, presence, and urban belonging.

© Photo: KomshiLOOK Archive, 2024

"Golden Age - Performing Art Education for inmates and children", Teatringestazione, Italy

Golden Age is a theatre education, programming and production project for adult prisoners and their teenage children involving international artists, students, citizens. It restores political transformative power to artistic work in the social sphere, turning an act of relational mending into an act of social weaving, poetically reconstructing the parent-child and society-prisoner relationship. The programme includes ongoing theatre education, accompanied by intensive workshops conducted by international performing arts professionals; complemented by a period of professionalisation based on the production of a play, presented during a final event open to the public.

In conjunction with the intensive workshops, the international artists will present their repertory work staged in the prison and open to the public, making up a programme of events. Golden Age gives rise to a hybrid space with social, artistic, poetic and political values. The presence and rotation of professional figures in the field of performing arts, active at an international level, dropped into the local dimension of the prison, creates a short-circuit that unleashes new energies and inspires good practices and new interactions, renewing the artists' aesthetics and the atrophied imagination of the inmates, activating unprecedented relational and collaborative dynamics and finally attracting a transversal and heterogeneous public.

© Photo: Roberta Ruggiero

"Meeting Points, Off Stream, Greece

"Meeting Points" is an inclusive, participatory art project that brings together persons with and without sensory impairments to engage with contemporary art through a multisensory and co-creative process.

The project connects artists, museums, cultural professionals, social workers and diverse audiences to explore selected artworks in a way that values all senses and encourages active participation. Through a series of ten interactive public events (Meeting Points), five in museums and five in artists’ studios, participants discover contemporary artworks using touch, sound, smell and dialogue. These events foster a safe, creative space where participants collaboratively craft the creative description and offer feedback on tactile (relief) representations for each artwork.

The outcome of each Meeting Point forms the basis for the production of a universally accessible postcard featuring the artwork, resulting in a final collection of ten. These postcards will be available in museum gift shops, artists’ studios and other selected venues.

Launched in 2023 and currently ongoing, the 2026 edition introduces an exciting new dimension by integrating artists’ studios as creative spaces, bringing audiences closer to the artistic process.

'Meeting Points' reimagines accessibility as active participation, making contemporary art open, collaborative and meaningful for all.

Photo credit: Hichem Merouche

"Cabins", Paisanaje Association, Spain

Cabins is a socially engaged art project that brings together artists, designers, architects, and local communities to design and build shelters in Madrid’s Casa de Campo using local materials and bioconstruction techniques. Developed in dialogue with the park’s shepherds, each cabin serves as both a functional refuge and a site for learning, gathering, and connection with nature.

The project began in January 2025 with the construction of a first cabin involving university students. It now enters a new phase, engaging teenagers from local vocational training centers and a group of unaccompanied minors (MENA) from the nearby reception center. Participants are involved in every stage of the process, gaining hands-on experience while reimagining their relationship to the environment and to one another.

Cabins is conceived as a space for horizontal exchange, where practical, traditional, and artistic forms of knowledge are valued equally. It challenges conventional hierarchies in cultural production by centering voices often excluded—particularly youth—and cultivating collective creativity rooted in care. With a deep respect for the ecological integrity of the park, Cabañas offers a grounded, participatory model for how art can build community, foster belonging, and imagine more hopeful, shared futures.

© Photo : Paisanaje

"Color the Court(yard)", Visual Voices, Cyprus

Nicosia-Cyprus remains Europe’s last divided capital. Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities live apart, separated by a UN Buffer Zone and the affected walled city of Nicosia is suffering in urban decline.

For the upcoming Art Explora program, we propose the next evolution of Color the Court.

Shifting from participatory murals on basketball courts to community-led art and design in public space, Color the Court(yard) will transform a deserted, dilapidated site in Nicosia into a vibrant pocket park.

A Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot artist will engage with residents through socially engaged art and tactical urbanism methods. Together, they will co-design and co-create the pocket park elements such as seating, play structures, and lighting, merging placemaking with public art.

Old and new residents, Cypriots and newcomers, young and old, will collaborate across divides to shape a space that reflects their shared life in the city.

Color the Court(yard) aspires to:

– Foster collaboration across divisions

– Bring art into the rhythms of everyday life

– Embed participation in artistic production

– Make public space more vibrant, and beautiful

– Encourage shared ownership of place

The project is supported by the Intercommunal Socially Engaged Arts Hub and long-time partner, the Municipality of Nicosia.

© Photo : Giorgos Stylianou

"Watch#Talk#Change, The Box, Albania

Young filmmakers bring their stories to youth in conflict with the law, opening safe spaces for dialogue, reflection, and positive change. Watch#Talk#Change empowers young filmmakers to become peer educators, using their own short films to reach youth in conflict with the law. The project extends the successful Shif&Bej FILMA (4 editions) model beyond production and public premieres by bringing screenings and guided discussions directly inside juvenile justice institutions. Through film screenings, dialogue circles, and creative workshops, young people serve as cultural mediators, sparking open conversations about choices, resilience, and new opportunities.

Partnering with local justice authorities, educators, and youth workers, the project creates safe spaces where marginalized youth can reflect on their experiences, share stories, and imagine positive futures. By combining art, peer dialogue, and social reintegration, Watch#Talk#Change breaks cultural barriers, promotes inclusion, and builds a replicable model for using youth-made films as tools for social impact.

This innovative approach strengthens young creators’ voices while giving vulnerable peers hope, connection, and cultural access where it is needed most.

© Photo: TRIAD 1988 shpk

"Open House Tirana", Architecture Fund in Albania, Albania

Empowering young creatives and cultural professionals to reimagine cultural heritage through architecture, storytelling, and digital tools.

The project invites youth, local communities, and international visitors to explore architecture as a common good by engaging in a collaborative program of workshops, site-specific installations, and public events. Centered in Tirana with regional outreach, the initiative will activate underused, forgotten, or inaccessible spaces—transforming them through participatory design and cultural programming to become inclusive and accessible for all.

Participants will explore and interact with Tirana’s architectural heritage, develop temporary structures, curate architectural film screenings, and produce multimedia stories that reflect local narratives, urban memory, and environmental awareness. The program provides mentoring, capacity-building opportunities, and visibility for young talents, while strengthening civic engagement and raising awareness of spatial justice and sustainability. It aims to educate and inspire pride in Tirana’s architectural heritage.

The project builds on AFA’s experience with the Tirana Architecture Triennale, the “New Temporality” platform, and European cultural networks such as the LINA Community and the New European Bauhaus. It connects youth with professional and institutional actors, fosters cross-border collaboration, and promotes inclusive, transformative cultural action through architecture.

© Photo : Ina Omuri