The projects of professional international cooperation in the arts and culture in which Italy has engaged are countless, and a comprehensive picture cannot be drawn, given the fragmentation of the actors involved. This chapter focuses on a few of the many significant international projects in which different public and private institutions/organizations are involved.
There is a number of on-going projects which have a consolidated history of partnership among European cultural institutions and guarantee a strong level of continuity, such as:
- Michael-Multilingual Inventory for Heritage in Europe started in 2004 by MIC-Ministry of Culture in partnership with the French Ministry for Culture and the UK Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, with the support of the EU Commission in the framework of the Programme e-TEN (Electronic Trans-European Networks). Its aim is the creation of a Trans-European Portal for on-line multilingual access to the digital cultural contents through the adoption of common standards;
- Europeana, a cultural portal funded by the Horizon2020 programme, giving access to 30 million pieces of data provided for by cultural institutions (1.3 million by Italian institutions). It is important to underline the focus it has on digital tools and developments;
- Ecole des Maitres is an innovative multi-annual educational and artistic project started in 1990 and aimed at connecting young chosen professional European stakeholders in the field of the performing arts. It has been supported by the ministries for culture of various countries and has often benefited from the financial support of the EU.
Other European projects, led by Italian organisations of the third sector, are more recent but present as well a feature of continuity and strong partnership among the public and private sectors. Among them, the following are worth mentioning:
- Fabulamundi Playwriting Europe is a project involving theatres, festivals and cultural organisations from different EU Countries. The network – which has been funded three times by the Creative Europe Programme – aims to support and promote contemporary playwriting across Europe;
- Adeste + is a large-scale European cooperation project co-funded twice by the Creative Europe project aimed at expanding cultural participation through capacity building processes;
- BeSpectatctive! is a large-scale European cooperation project – co-funded twice by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union – which operates in the performing arts through artistic productions and participatory practices aimed at involving the citizens and spectators in creative and organisational processes.
A very recent one is CHARTER, an Erasmus+ project funded in 2020 (starting date 2021). CHARTER aims toclarify occupational roles and activities and create the tools for an integrated, responsive education system; identify curricula and learning outcomes over a sample group in order to equip education and training to respond to current and future cultural heritage skills needs; and to put a structure on cultural heritage as an economically active sector. CHARTER reunites leading academic and training organizations and policy stakeholders in the European cultural heritage sector, which includes the Fondazione Scuola dei beni e delle attività culturali, supported by MiC.
Comments are closed.