The 2026 Art Explora - Académie des beaux-arts European Award

"Touch Beyond Sight", Jazdaa Polska!​, Poland

Touch Beyond Sight seeks to lay the foundations for a tactile choreographic technique rooted in blind perception. Building upon our artistic work with blind and visually impaired participants, the project explores touch as a source of movement, creativity, attention and embodied knowledge. Rather than adapting artistic practices for blind audiences, the project positions blind and visually impaired people as experts, knowledge holders and co-creators expanding choreographic language. Through artistic laboratories, blind-to-blind transmission sessions and collaborative research, participants will identify, test and partially codify tactile movement exercises, touch-based partnering, body memory practices, kinesthetic listening and non-visual spatial orientation methods. A choreographic performance based on participants' histories of touch will function as an artistic laboratory where the technique can be embodied, observed and refined. Beyond the artistic outcome, the project aims to establish a knowledge base on dance, touch and non-visual perception. Through podcasts, interviews, open-access publications, documentation and a transferable toolkit, Touch Beyond Sight will preserve sensory experiences and create resources for artists, researchers, educators and blind communities. Participants may strengthen self-confidence, body awareness and social belonging, while principles may later inspire neurodivergent communities, children and intergenerational learning. The project will support research and development of tactile choreographic practices across Europe.

© Photo: Bartosz Seifert

"Boundless Horizons," Frequenz__​, Germany

The project seeks to transform the city into a vibrant resonance space, inspired by the upcoming 800th anniversary of Lübeck’s "Seven Towers," a UNESCO World Heritage site. Residents are invited to dedicate 30 minutes during a day to simply listen to the city’s five principal organs, fostering moments of reflection and connection.

A commission will be exclusively awarded to create an innovative work that reflects the project’s forward-looking character. This initiative expands the listening experience by making it accessible in public spaces, extending beyond traditional indoor venues.

Following the main event, a series of interactive installations will be open to all social groups in the five churches and eventually in public spaces. Workshops will be offered several weeks prior to the event, enabling a wide range of residents to engage with innovative digital tools and create their own soundscapes. These activities harness digital media as a powerful means to encourage broad participation, raise environmental awareness, and strengthen social cohesion and community spirit.

The entire program is designed to unfold within a single day, with workshops scheduled in advance at various cultural locations throughout the city. This approach enriches the cultural experience and attracts a larger audience.

© Photo: Courtesy of Frequenz__

"LIVING REGIONAL NEWSPAPER," RAMAGU, Slovakia

Transforming residents of an isolated region into active co-creators of art by combining local journalism with site-specific documentary theatre.

The geographically isolated Zamagurie region suffers from a lack of cultural infrastructure and the marginalisation of local minorities. Our project changes this by directly engaging vulnerable and specific communities – Roma, Gorals, and Rusyns across all generations. They will not merely be passive spectators. Utilising the resources of our independent monthly Zamagurské noviny, we will train them as "community reporters". Directly in their villages, they will collect oral history, intergenerational testimonies, local myths, and everyday issues.

This authentic documentary material will then be collaboratively transformed with the award-winning RAMAGU Theatre into a site-specific theatre performance. The piece will not be staged in traditional halls, but in unconventional locations – courtyards, squares, and village streets – completely breaking down the barriers between artists and audiences.

Because this innovative model has huge potential, we will create an international methodological guide (Toolkit) in English based on our process. Our goal is to provide other European rural regions with a blueprint on how to strengthen social inclusion and cultural accessibility through co-creation.

© Photo: Courtesy of RAMAGU

"Safe Passage," THEAMA, Greece

Safe Passage explores the enduring power of a promise: an obligation that connects people across distance, separation and even death. The project creates an accessible digital museum that positions refugee makers and disabled artists as authors of cultural production and materialises the promise through their craft and performance. Refugee and local makers transform salvaged life jackets and boats, materials that once carried the promise of safety at sea, into handcrafted bags that open the museum through a QR code. Disabled and non-disabled artists embody the same promise through a filmed performance of the Greek and Balkan song Tou Nekrou Aderfou, presented in the museum’s first room. The bags will be distributed through European cultural institutions, connecting the museum and its creators with audiences across Europe.

© Photo: Courtesy of THEAMA

"Kino Susidiv (Films by Our Neighbours)", Cinema and Culture Development, Ukraine

Kino Susidiv (Films by Our Neighbours) is a free annual film festival in Uzhhorod, a Ukrainian city bordering Slovakia and Hungary, dedicated to contemporary cinema from six neighbouring countries: Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, and Austria. The festival promotes intercultural dialogue through free public screenings, discussions, and accessible events, including adapted screenings for neurodivergent audiences.

In 2027, Kino Susidiv will launch the Neighbourhood Cinema Academy, a new audience engagement programme for 15 teenagers from frontline regions and de-occupied territories of Ukraine. During a week-long residency in Uzhhorod, participants will discover contemporary European cinema, meet filmmakers and cultural professionals from across Central and Eastern Europe, and receive practical training in audience development, film curation, and cultural event organisation.

Upon returning home, each participant will organise a free public screening and discussion in their community, becoming a local cultural ambassador. The project transforms young audiences into active cultural organisers, expanding access to European cinema in war-affected regions while creating a replicable model of youth-led cultural participation that can be adapted across Europe.

© Photo: Courtesy of Cinema and Culture Development

"Classic for Kids", Classic Unlimited, Romania

Looking to reduce inequalities in access to music and arts education for over 1.500 children, the project reaches 20 rural and small urban communities in Romania, facing ethnic (particularly concerning Roma children) and geographical barriers (isolated villages and small depopulated cities) or dealing with behavioural disorders, learning difficulties or socio-emotional issues.

In these marginalised communities, cultural infrastructure is entirely nonexistent. The vast majority of schools we visit have no specialised music teacher and zero musical instruments, leaving children completely cut off from any cultural interactions.

Since schools lack infrastructure, our "musical van" brings music to them. Travelling with a piano, hundreds of small percussion instruments, and mini-keyboards, we teach children how to listen to and play music. But most importantly, we give them the opportunity to make music as a means of developing creativity, social interaction, and inclusion.

Our musical shows are designed for children aged 6 to 10, featuring both classical and contemporary music written specifically for young audiences, along with a tailor-made musical workshop.

The “Classic for Kids Musical Guide” expands our reach beyond the 20 schools we have visited, providing teachers with valuable resources to enrich their music lessons and parents with digital musical educational resources.

© Photo: Courtesy of Classic Unlimited

"TRACES," DU Dance (NI), United Kingdom

The project prioritises young people, older adults and local communities, bringing together participants who rarely have opportunities to collaborate through shared creative processes. These groups represent different lived experiences, perspectives and relationships to culture; creating opportunities for meaningful exchange and diverse, collective authorship.

The project builds on DU Dance (NI)’s existing community relationships, using established programmes as an entry point to engage participants in the development of the work. However, the project is intentionally designed to extend beyond these groups. Their contributions will act as a public launch for the digital archive, before widening access to audiences and inviting members of the public to contribute directly to the space through their own movement and interaction.

Key objectives include democratising access to culture and digital tech. Both dance and immersive technologies are often experienced as specialist, institutional or commercially driven tools. This project places them directly into the hands of communities, creating opportunities for people to shape, influence and author cultural experiences that feel contemporary, relevant, accessible and theirs.

By combining community development, public participation and digital innovation, the project aims to reach a broad cross-section of society while ensuring those traditionally underrepresented within cultural spaces remain central to the process.

© Photo: KMPhoto

"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

"Kristoffer on the Edge of the Universe," Ex Voto à la Lune, France

Invite children to become authors of their own world narratives through an immersive journey combining theater, science, philosophy and digital creation.

Kristoffer on the Edge of the Universe invites children and their families to observe, experiment, seek out, and create in order to explore the universe’s great questions, develop critical thinking skills, and discover doubt as a motor of knowledge and dialogue.

The project combines Kant, a show using magic and holographic technologies, with an immersive journey consisting of a virtual reality experience, a cosmogonic labyrinth (augmented reality & digital library) and workshops for collective creation. Children discover how different civilizations, scientific disciplines and philosophical traditions have tried to explain the origin of the world.

Children discover how different civilizations, scientific disciplines and philosophical traditions have tried to explain the origin of the world.

They are then invited to imagine, tell and make short videos featuring their own cosmogony. These audiovisual creations enrich a digital library accessible to teachers, families and other participants.

By promoting experimentation and shared creation, Kristoffer on the Edge of the Universe develops children’s curiosity and ability to collectively take on universal issues. The project thus proposes a new form of cultural mediation where the artistic experience becomes a space for active participation, transmission and common construction of knowledge.

© Photo: Maxime Lethelier

"Dictionary of Secret Sounds," L'Albero, Italy

Co-creating a new opera language accessible to deaf and hearing audiences.

In Italy, attempts to make opera accessible to deaf people have largely relied on translating works originally created for hearing audiences into sign language. INCLUSIVE OPERA is an artistic research that brings together deaf and hearing artists and local communities to create an innovative opera-performance. INCLUSIVE OPERA proposes a different approach: rather than adapting an existing art form, it places sign language, gesture and deaf culture at the heart of the creative process. Since 2021, a collective of artists, educators and deaf participants has been exploring the relationship between sound and gesture, score and movement, singing and vibration, visual art, Italian Sign Language (LIS) and vernacular visual. Through the Community Opera methodology, the research aims to develop a new inclusive performative language and a “score of the body”, combining gesture, movement and music, bringing together deaf and hearing people in a co-creation process where no language or artistic practice prevails over another. Artistic residencies involved dancers, musicians, students, deaf communities, participants from diverse cultural backgrounds.

The next phases will be the creation of libretto, visual and musical composition, the first study performance and the final production.

© Photo: Action Collective

"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

"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.

"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

"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

"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

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

Artist Jeremy Deller (a Turner Prize winner) has been given free rein to collaborate with a network of artists—including musicians, poets, and performers—and astronomers to make astronomy accessible and engaging through art. Together, they will devise cultural events, festivals, and participatory carnivals across Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). A major national event will be held at the Greenwich Observatory, which will be transformed for the occasion. The project will feature a dynamic program—encompassing visual arts, literature, and street-based science engagement ("science busking")—designed to dismantle the misconception that "science isn't for me."+L22

© Photo: Courtesy of the Royal Observatory Greenwich

"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

"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

"L'autre retour", Bibliothèques Sans Frontières, France

In Ukraine, more than 1.2 million veterans will have to reintegrate into a society from which they sometimes feel cut off, a challenge that the population identifies as the greatest of the post-war period. Many, hindered by stigma, do not access formal mental health devices.

The project "L'autre retour" proposes a non-clinical entry point: librarianship. In a neutral space, animated by facilitators from the veteran community itself, reading becomes a tool to put words on the experience of war, at a distance, without re-exposing oneself there.

The texts, drawings and notebooks that come out of it are then shown to the public: a traveling exhibition, presented in a gallery in Ukraine, then in France and at the European Commission in Brussels, which transforms an intimate work into a gesture of recognition.

Led by Libraries Without Borders, which already runs a library-care program in five libraries in Kyiv, the project documents its methodology so that it can spread to other Ukrainian cities and to audiences affected by the war.

© Photo: Courtesy of Bibliothèques Sans Frontières

"States of Being: Embedding Accessible Practice and Building Representation", FESTIVAL.ORG, United Kingdom

FESTIVAL.ORG brings people together through free outdoor arts - spanning theatre, dance, music, circus and installation. Our mission is to engage new audiences, particularly those facing barriers to culture, by co-creating projects that celebrate local stories, foster pride of place, and connect communities.

We champion inclusivity and equity, dismantling barriers, especially for disabled artists and audiences. Through a year-round programme of international partnerships and collaboration, commissioning, producing, touring, community engagement and artist development, we help both people and places to thrive.

Our flagship Greenwich+Docklands International Festival, hailed by The Guardian as “the best free festival in London,” has welcomed over 2 million people in its first 30 years. Since 2015, we’ve led Global Streets, touring free international outdoor arts with embedded audience development to 14 of England’s most culturally underserved areas.

In 2023, we became the UK’s first festival awarded Platinum Status by Attitude is Everything for accessibility.

© Photo: Chloe Loftus Dance and Greg D’Haillecourt