Corners Project

CORNERS project, an intercultural artists’ platform, designed and driven by a partnership of cultural institutions at the edges of Europe will be hosted by CCA.

CORNERS creates opportunities for artists and researchers to produce multidisciplinary contemporary artistic and cultural collaborative projects. The objective is to enable exchange across geographical, political and economic divisions. More than 60 artists and researchers (and the number grows) have met through CORNERS, as well as more than 30 organizations and institutions as partners and collaborators

CORNERS interconnects artists with different backgrounds – geographical, social, political and professional – and of different disciplines – photography, video, sound, new technologies, dance, theatre, performance, music. CORNERS artists are both both young / emerging and experienced / established. They are chosen based on artistic excellence, on their ability to design protocols for engaging people and on their capacity to communicate interculturally. Sometimes researchers (sociologists, academics, architects…) join the group, which remains open to interdisciplinary encounters.

Artists most often meet during CORNERS Xpeditions, exploring outer regions of Europe – North/Sapmi, Caucasus, Balkans, East, Basque Country, Northern Ireland, North East England, urban spaces like Bradford and more. Together with researchers and guided by local hosts, they travel within each region, encountering citizens and landscapes.

Participants on an Xpedition both observe and animate the places they visit. They prepare collective actions to interact in public spaces, addressing both hot topics from the local context and their specific artistic perspectives. These actions, called sometimes Piazza or Pazar or Stanica, evolve where people commonly meet: squares, markets, train and bus stations. One primary outcome of Xpeditions are the DocuArt works, responses from the artists / researchers – reflections on their own experience in one particular corner of Europe and the process. From these experiences, artistic collaborations involving two or more artists from different corners of Europe are commissioned and co-produced. Each chosen co-creation is coordinated by two or more CORNERS Partners.

CORNERS co-creations are developed across borders of artistic disciplines and have strong cross-cultural dimensions. The task is to communicate with different audiences and communities at the edges of Europe. Artists collect stories from one corner of Europe, re-telling them in another. They use cultural and social diversity to develop fresh artistic values. Some collaborations transform into participatory artworks, into co-creation. Giving voice to groups usually hidden and non-visible (children, elderly people, migrants, prisoners…) is often a focus of CORNERS artistic projects.

Find out more about CORNERS here.