BRIDGING THE A-I-R

ongoing

Bridging the A-I-R (BtAIR) is a European cultural project tackling structural imbalances in residency practice. It recognises that sustainable cultural mobility depends on supporting residency hosts — whose work, expertise and infrastructure are often overlooked despite being vital to the European cultural ecosystem. The project strengthens their capacities, facilitates peer learning, and develops collaborative models linking local contexts with the wider European framework. With partners from six countries — Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Germany — it tests transferable residency formats in varied cultural, geographic, and institutional environments. These formats prioritise care, relationality, regeneration, and balance between centre and periphery. A key tool is a two-tiered digital infrastructure. The Czech platform www.artinres.cz will be cloned and locally adapted for Slovakia and Hungary to support national ecosystems and emerging residency providers. This adaptation is already underway, with potential for further expansion to other countries in the future. Complementing this, the new European platform www.btair.eu will function as the project’s central digital hub — providing access to open calls, methodologies, good practices and contacts, and enabling peer-to-peer exchange across the continent. Both levels will be interconnected to ensure reciprocal knowledge flow and horizontal transfer between national and transnational contexts — including partners in Italy, Germany and Spain. Bridging the A-I-R addresses urgent cultural challenges — such as performance pressure, time poverty and centralisation — by offering a replicable framework of care, collaboration and systemic sustainability. Its outputs — methodologies, case studies and policy briefs — will be open-access and relevant to the broader European cultural field, with long-term use and impact beyond the project lifetime.