Green Streets of Europe

ended

Artists and festivals depend on touring and solid infrastructure to provide rural and remote areas with vibrant artistic experiences from all over Europe. These touring and distribution practices are resource-intensive, and we find ourselves inadvertently creating a burden on the environment or worse: contributing negatively to climate change. Green Streets of Europe is a residency project where four outdoor / street theatre festivals are inviting performing artists into a cooperation to explore and co-develop more sustainable formats of touring and festival operations. The consortium is formed by outdoor / street theatre festivals already engaged in the circulation of artistic works in Europe. Altogether they circulate +400 artists a year. The festivals are from small to mid-sized, and all partners contribute to this project with experience in sharing and distributing international artistic works, as well as being cultural hubs in their local communities. GSE challenges the conventional structures of artistic production, distribution, and touring through 15 open-format residencies. The experience gained in the residencies is supplemented with knowledge-sharing activities during and in between residencies. Also, inputs and knowledge from outside the cultural sector from experts on sustainability and local collaborators will stimulate the process. The process is dialectical – as a cocreation between artists and festival organisers. In GSE process is the driver. The project explores the artistic process as a valuable asset for the festivals, a change in perspective from the artistic product to artistic processes as an enabler of building deeper connections between artists, festival organisers and the local context of the festivals. The aim is to qualify the green transition in the festival organisations and transnational touring, looking for new paths of connecting the international artistic sector with the local communities of Europe.