EDGE - Co-creation, circulation, capacity building and awareness in Peripheral and Ultra Peripheral Festivals

ended

EDGE – Co-creation, circulation, capacity building and awareness in Peripheral and Ultra Peripheral Festivals, is a collaborative project of three boutique festivals: Tremor, in the Azores, Portugal, Keroxen in the Canary Islands, Spain, and Fengaros, in Cyprus. EDGE aims at closing the gaps between the festivals of peripheral and ultra peripheral islands, and those of central Europe by creating a transnational co-creation program for local artists and by enforcing environmentally responsible behaviors in festivals. Festivals from peripheral zones face inevitable economic and logistical challenges when compared to their central counterparts, which reflect on greater difficulty in booking foreign acts, as well as in fostering strong, structured music industries that enable music careers for local artists and allow significative local community engagement. Moreover, adopting sound environmental, inclusion and gender balance agendas, in often isolated and fragile communities, can be particularly challenging. This project addresses the problems of island peripherality, while acknowledging each island’s particular features and challenges, by supporting the transnational co-creation of local artists, as a way of both promoting them to external publics and promoters, and bringing each festival closer to its local community, thereby increasing audience engagement and renovation. Notwithstanding its co-creation focus, EDGE is also centered in bringing sustained and structured environmentally friendly solutions to peripheral festivals while adopting responsible inclusion and gender balance actions. EDGE’s capacity building program will reflect this project’s main objectives to train artists and music professionals of each territory to boost their music scenes, and bring proximity to local artists, music professionals and general public of the territories to more structured and dynamic music markets.