"NewImages OnTour x TUMO," NewImages, France

NewImages OnTour x TUMO is an international program developed by NewImages in partnership with TUMO – Center for Creative Technologies to promote the discovery of immersive creation among young audiences. The project offers a itinerant program composed of immersive works, workshops, meetings with artists and mediation time, directly within TUMO centers.

Its ambition is to make immersive creation more accessible while encouraging young people to develop a critical view of the images and technologies that surround them. Through a participatory approach, participants discover new forms of storytelling, experiment with creative practices and exchange with professionals in the sector.

The project is part of an international cooperation approach based on the network of TUMO centres. After an initial pilot phase in Portugal, it is intended to be gradually rolled out in other European centres, in order to create a network of young audiences committed to immersive creation.

Ultimately, NewImages OnTour aims to foster a new generation of viewers, creators and influencers, while strengthening the links between the cultural, educational and innovation sectors.

© Photo: TUMO Portugal

"RADIOACTIVITY," TERCEIRA PESSOA, Portugal

RadioACTIVITY builds Portugal's first National Prison Radio Network, transforming five prisons into spaces of artistic authorship through participatory radio arts.

Over 18 months, 80–100 incarcerated participants across five Portuguese prisons collaborate with professional theatre directors, award-winning writers and sound artists to co-create 20 original audio works — writing scripts, directing their own voices, recording and editing broadcast-quality radio pieces. The works circulate between prisons through a newly created national network, and are broadcast publicly on Antena 1 (RTP), Portugal's national radio station.

The project does not bring culture into prisons. It invites incarcerated people to become cultural producers — authors, performers and creators whose voices reach audiences beyond prison walls.

Built on a proven model developed at Guarda Prison between 2022 and 2025, where independent scientific evaluation documented significant improvements in self-control, self-efficacy and social integration among participants, RadioACTIVITY now scales nationally to establish a transferable model for participatory audio arts in custodial environments — with clear replication potential across Europe.

© Photo: Jorge Carmona

"Open Week," Opéra de Lille​, France

The Open Week is a new format of cultural opening proposed four times per season on the occasion of the operatic productions of Opera de Lille. For a week, from Tuesday to Saturday in the evening, the Grand Foyer is transformed into a space of meetings and discoveries freely accessible, without reservation or ticket.

The goal is to open the doors of the institution and to arouse curiosity by offering a friendly, accessible and uninhibited experience of the Opera. The public can thus enter the place independently of a performance and discover differently the works being created or rehearsed as well as the artists in the production.  

Each edition is based on the themes of the opera in progress to build a multidisciplinary program combining meetings with artists, conferences, workshops, initiations, participatory proposals, DJ sets or scientific and cultural interventions. These times promote exchanges between audiences, international artists invited and local actors.  

Entirely free, the Open Week attracts a large and diverse audience, thus contributing to discover lyrical art differently.

© Photo: Frédéric Iovino

"The Travelling Universe: Royal Observatory on Tour", Royal Observatory Greenwich​, United Kingdom

Led by Turner Prize winning artist Jeremy Deller, this nationwide project brings together astronomers and artists with the aim of making astronomy accessible to everyone. All activities will take place in a large custom-built tent that will tour the UK, effectively becoming a travelling space festival where a day could start with illustrated talks or workshops, a lightshow, live music and end with a rave celebrating our relationship to the Solar System!

Deller has been given free rein to collaborate with a network of performance and visual artists alongside astronomers and an advisory board of children to engage people in the awe and wonder of space. By challenging the notion 'science isn't for me', we aim to put the 'you' in universe!

Touring all four nations - from parks, dark sky areas, sacred sites and music festivals to cities, towns and villages – dynamic and fun programmes will reflect local communities through dance, cosmic storytelling, in-conversations, cosplay, science busking and more.

The tour will culminate in Greenwich, London with a grand space pageant - a planetary procession telling the story of astronomy from the four-nation's many viewpoints.

© Photo: Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum.

"WHERE IS MY SHIPYARD?", Gdański Archipelag Kultury​, Poland

WHERE IS MY SHIPYARD? is a multi-year artistic and social project. It is addressed to former Shipyard workers and an international audience. Its aim is to recover and bring into public view the forgotten histories of the Shipyard’s former workers – men and women who helped shape this place and who today have been displaced from it by development and revitalisation. The project responds to this need through the symbolic act of returning this place to them in the form of an artistic-manifesto.

The project will be led by artist Jaśmina Wójcik. An intermedial performance „WHERE IS MY SHIPYARD?” will emerge from a multi-stage process grounded in long-term relationships with participants, the reconstruction of sensory memory, co-creation, and collaboration with the local artistic community.

The premiere is planned for 2028 as the opening event of the30th FETA Street and Open-Air Theatre Festival (Gdańsk, Poland), where it will be seen by approx. 20,000 viewers. The project will also include a film from the event, available online.

© Photo: Karol Stanczak

"Community Storytellers - Lewisham Borough of Literature", London Writers Centre, United Kingdom

Mentoring Lewisham residents, aged over 18 y/o, as storytellers to lead their own creative writing programmes in the communities where they live.

London Writers Centre has a big bold ambition: to make Lewisham the UK's first Borough of Literature - a place where everyone's story matters. Community Storytellers is our response to consultations with local residents which show a clear appetite for platforming underrepresented voices, creating intergenerational connections, and enabling community-led programming. This pilot programme aims to:

- build the capacity of four community storytellers through creative skills development and support to lead creative activity in their communities;

- celebrate local voices and stories through 420 accessible participation opportunities across Lewisham's diverse communities;  

- and pilot a new volunteer model for community-led literary programming, providing evidence and learning on sustainability, replicability and scaling.  

We will recruit four Lewisham residents from underserved communities as community storytellers, and pair each with an experienced writer-mentor whose practice is rooted in community work. Together they design and deliver community writing workshops in spaces and with communities the storyteller already belongs to. The pilot will produce an impact report and co-designed open-access methodology toolkit, launched at a stakeholder sharing event and made available online, supporting wider replication by other organisations.

© Photo: Kashif Haque

"ECHO", Fondation Kaloy, Greece

Inviting children aged 4–12 in rural Greek communities to listen to their landscape and give it back as music, colour and story.

ECHO - Music, Colour & Ecology in Rural Communities is a participatory arts and ecology programme for children in rural and mountain communities of the Corinthia region, Greece. An expansion of Fondation Kaloy's outreach programme «Pame Scholeio!», ECHO invites children to become attentive listeners to the world around them - in the spirit of the myth of Echo, the nymph who receives what the landscape offers and returns it transformed.

Working with an interdisciplinary team of musicians, visual artists, organic farmers, environmental educators and craftspeople, children explore three interconnected dimensions: SOUND (listening to and recreating the soundscape of their place), COLOUR (discovering natural pigments and the visual language of their environment), and ECOLOGY (learning about local biodiversity and seasonal cycles through direct contact with the land).

The project culminates in a public sharing event where children present their music, images and stories to their community - the moment of return.

The result is a freely available open-access toolkit, transferable to any rural community across Europe - a living methodology rooted in place, shaped by community, and scalable across borders.

© Photo: Kaloy Foundation

"River Elders," The Collective Foundation, Bulgaria

The Collective Foundation places the elder citizens of Sofia City (65 years and older) at the centre of contemporary culture, as they collaborate with practicing artists to co-create 8 site-specific public works for the 2027 Rivers of Sofia festival. These artworks interpret elders' perspectives on urban rivers, making neglected urban sites into links tying generations together.

The project pairs 8 elderly citizens with 8 contemporary artists focusing on visual, three-dimensional, or time-based media. These pairs go through a process of incubation and co-creation to each produce an original work, with elders in the lead.

The 8 artworks then become anchors for interactive programming tailored to senior citizens at the 2027 Rivers of Sofia Festival. The goal is to engage at least 100 active participants of 65+ years old, who take part in and contribute to storytelling and craft-making experiences; and later, in 2028, to increase the share of elders in our festival's audience threefold.

The project's wider ambition is to remedy the generational gap in fine art in our post-communist society, where older citizens are absent from contemporary art, both as creators and as audiences. River Elders reverses the status quo by focusing on elders' perspectives and completing and enriching contemporary art.

© Photo: Rivers of Sofia Festival, Sofia, Bulgaria, The Collective Foundation (Фондация Колективът). Photographer: Veliko Balabanov.

"Arte Ambulatorio," Cultura en Vena, Spain

Arte Ambulatorio brings museum-quality exhibitions, cultural mediation and artistic participation into hospitals, reaching patients, families, caregivers and healthcare professionals who are usually excluded from traditional cultural spaces.

Developed by Cultura en Vena, Arte Ambulatorio is a travelling exhibition and mediation programme that transforms hospital corridors, waiting rooms, consultation areas and inpatient units into spaces for culture, encounter and emotional wellbeing. Previous exhibitions such as "Goya in a Hospital?" and "Sorolla in a Hospital?" have shown how major museum collections can be reinterpreted from the perspective of health, care and emotional experience.

Cultura en Vena proposes a new curatorial and participatory dimension of Arte Ambulatorio: a travelling exhibition around Frida Kahlo, conceived specifically for hospitals and activated through cultural mediation, creative writing workshops for paediatric patients and live music interventions. For the European award, Cultura en Vena proposes an initial implementation of this new phase in one hospital, over one year of cultural activities.

Frida Kahlo’s artistic universe offers a powerful entry point into themes closely connected to the hospital experience: the body, pain, vulnerability, identity, resilience, emotional expression and care. The project aims to expand access to culture, improve emotional wellbeing and humanise hospital environments.

© Photo: Action Collective