- May 27, 2025
- 9:17 am
5 reasons why every young creative person should apply to Creative Europe's Culture Moves Europe open calls?! Culture Moves Europe?!
Creative Europe (CE) is the largest European fund dedicated to creative professions and the creation of better conditions for the more qualitative and effective development of culture through various types of programs. Culture Moves Europe (CME) is one of these initiatives that, in two lines (individual and exchange on a residency basis), enables creatives to collaborate with other creatives to develop their capacities, network, and create, while traveling and discovering new cultures. The project was on a trial basis starting from 2022 and concluded this year, but due to its success, CE is considering continuing the program, which provided mobility grants to over 7,000 artists from various domains.
Here are five reasons why I believe every young European artist should try to undertake this exchange. The list is interwoven with personal experiences that I, as an architect and cultural worker, gained through this program during a two-month stay in Barcelona. Through Culture Moves Europe, I had the opportunity to be on an exchange and learn about video mapping from Filipa Roca, one of the best European video mappers, originally from Herceg Novi. The exchange was an excellent opportunity to supplement my knowledge and enrich my architectural perspective in the field of new media as a contemporary artistic expression.
1. Learn Something New!
How I choose video mapping?
Video mapping is a projection technique where video content is precisely aligned with the contours and elements of an architectural object. Instead of a regular canvas, the facade of a building becomes the "canvas," highlighting its shapes, textures, and details, transforming architecture into a dynamic, visual installation. This technique combines art, technology, and architecture into a unique spatial experience. It is a communication technique from the domain of new media, inseparable from architecture since it utilizes architectural elements and is intrinsically linked to the designed space.
One of the most important aspects of this program is certainly the fact that it is oriented towards creatives who want to upgrade their knowledge and skills in the domains in which they express themselves in their local environments. Once you find a person or studio from whom you would like to learn something, simply contact them and ask if they are available for collaboration. Before making contact, make sure to have at least a sketch of the program you would like to undertake during the exchange so they can tell you if it is feasible for them. If it is not, you can continue and look for others. Based on this program, which is submitted during the application phase, evaluators will assess the quality of the submitted project. If the project passes, you will have the opportunity to be a mentored by the person or in the studio of the artist you have chosen for collaboration. The program can be short-term, lasting a few days, or it can last up to two months, depending on your needs.
2. Travel!
Expand your horizons and get to know a new culture while learning.
Exchange and getting to know new cultures have always been a personal motivation for traveling. As the wise saying goes, travel and books are the only things you buy that make you richer. Culture Moves Europe implies that you cannot collaborate with artists in your own country; you must step out of your comfort zone. The travel component is an integral part of the CME program and one of the most important reasons why I believe this program can be interesting to young artists from Montenegro and the region.
Although Barcelona was not unknown to me, the impression a city leaves when you stay there for two months cannot be compared to the quick experience a destination leaves during a low-cost weekend. In the rush to visit as many hotspots and places that look good on social media, there's continuous deficit of time to experience what truly defines the character and culture of a city—its inhabitants. No building alone defines the character of a city, not even a masterpiece like the Sagrada Familia. You might be able to judge a book by its cover, but you certainly cannot read it. Tourist spots face particularly tough times when it comes to quality of life, as the financial benefits that the tourism industry brings often overshadow the numerous accumulating cultural and social problems induced by such unsustainable development models. Sustainable tourism must become the foundation of future cultural activities if we do not want local residents to continue greeting tourists with water guns. Understanding the context and the desire to change or not change something in your own environment upon returning from a trip, are some of the most important aspects of personal transformative development that travel induce. To truly understand a context, you must inevitably dedicate some time to it. Culture Moves Europe can provide you with precisely this kind of connection to the context, as the light program requirements leave plenty of room for getting to know the culture and environment where you will be staying.
3. Engage!
Transferring knowledge to the local context after completing the exchange
All programs funded by the EU funds generally have a component of knowledge transfer/sustainability. In other words, once you finish the exchange and capacity building, the focus shifts to transferring the acquired experience and spreading it. This phase is also anticipated before the exchange itself and is part of the questions you will need to answer when filling out the application form, so it's important to consider it before the project even begins.
In my case, alongside the desire to learn more about video mapping, the idea of organizing such an event in Bar, which I had seen during previous travels, was also cooking. Since Gradionica works on cultural heritage, the proposal was to organize a video mapping event for one of the upcoming editions of the European Heritage Dayson one of the historic sites of cultural significance in Bar. Non-invasive work on perceptual and artistic design can be perfectly adapted, whether it's Slade's Palace of King Nikola or the Shopping Mall by architect Batrić Mijović. Since video mapping is a financially challenging event, an initiative was also directed to the Evropskoj Kući to jointly attempt to create a similar event in one of the future editions of the European Heritage Days. They are currently busy with the opening of the EU House in Bar, and the communication is still ongoing, so I hope we will have the opportunity to invite Filip as a guest and work together in Bar as well. This kind of connection naturally leads us to the next reason...
4. Networking!
Connecting is always welcome.
Networking is sometimes like a Kinder surprise – sweets and rarely refused, with a surprise that is unpredictable and more often delightful than disappointing. Two months is a long period. You learn many things, both those you went for and others that happen by chance.
Random roommates and surprise birthday parties certainly weren't part of the plan, but they connect you perfectly with the local context and people we talked about earlier. Spaniards are certainly very warm, relaxed, and love to socialize. In any case, another birthday to remember.
Or who could have planned that I would have the chance to see the Sagrada Familia in the dark, at a historic moment after an incredible blackout across all of Spain and Portugal, while explaining to my roommates from the apartment how it was in the 90s on the Balkans, where electricity was often missing more than it was available, and we often fell asleep with candles after semi-improvised warm-cold showers from cauldrons with buckets.
Or who could have planned that my exchange would coincide with the first edition of the Primavera R urban resilience festival, and that this random circumstance would lead to a conversation with a professor who deals with a topic that has occupied my attention for a long time and which I'd loike to work on R&D level, and even less that it could possibly lead to enrollment in doctoral studies at his department.
In any case, networking is often overlooked in Montenegro and we don't always given much attention at events to it, but from my experience, it always proves true that more work is often done informally after meetings while casually chatting, drinking, and socializing than what formal frameworks of seminars/panels/conferences, etc., can provide.
5. Budget!
Let's be honest
Before we start doubting that all of this is too good to be true and that even one of these reasons is enough to start applying, let alone all of them, here comes that famous "however."
Creative professions can be seductive, and one of the biggest issues artists I meet in work and life face is the topic of finances. This antagonistic relationship between art and 'structure' is quite familiar to me through architecture and construction, but it is also very pronounced when we talk about financial "structures" and frameworks. There is an almost burning need for artists, especially in our regions, to immediately put up a guard and retreat at the first mention of budgeting, planning, control, and frameworks, repeating like a mantra – I have never been good at that, I am too much of an artistic soul.
And here I feel the need to speak openly. Although many artistic souls start fainting at the very mention of bureaucracy, I am firmly convinced that it is precisely the financial structure and economic component of creativity that many good artists lack to bridge their imaginary world and ideas into this real one. For your project to be approved, in addition to the program, you must also present a budget that is necessary for implementing that program and covers all basic costs you may have. You receive 75 euros per day intended for accommodation, food, and materials, plus additional funds for travel expenses. Even in expensive Barcelona, this amount will be helpful, if you plan in time. We would all like bureaucracy to be less complicated, but we are also very much bothered (especially artists who oftne like to believe they are more righteous than others) when tax funds we pay are misused, whether by an artist or a politician. The same applies to the people who organize this fund and who spend the money of EU taxpayers. Even the most beautiful picture in the world has a frame, and if you don't like the picture, it certainly not because of the frame.
Instead of a conclusion
And finally, a message to all young artists or people who feel creative. If you have a creative person whose work you follow and often think about how you could do something similar in your local context, contact them and ask if they would be interested in hosting you for an exchange. Create a short program of joint capacity building where you will learn from the artist and in return you can help them by assisting in any technical segment that would ease their overloaded workload. And there you have a simple recipe for a good exchange – for more advice, follow those influencers; we don't care about likes here, it's already enough for us that you read all this 🙂
P.s. – If you've made it to the end of the text, first of all, kudos! It seems that in recent years, our attention span has shrunk to a miserable 20 seconds due to technology. Secondly, I would like to steal an additional 14 seconds from you, and invite you to watch what was one of the most impressive experiences of this exchange. After experiencing for the first time in my life a metro blackout and station in the dark, after going out on the street and realizing there was no electricity in the neighborhood with all the shopkeepers standing in front of their shops, bezuspješno pokušao da se javim prijateljima s kojima sam se dogovaro da se vidim na pivo jer nije bilo signala, slučajno imao desetak papirnih eura da pivo platim analogno jer kartice nijesu radile i naglabao sa random ljudima iz bara što bi mogao biti uzrok nestanka struje u Španiji, Portugalu, Francuskoj i UK (glas koji su puštili ljudi u prvih 20ak minuta je bio da je struja nestala i u ove druge dvije države) – urbana otpornost mi se simbolično otjelotvorila pred očima. Na raskrsnici Carrer del Comte Borrell i Carrer del Parlament, zona koja je preobraćena u pješačku kao dio projekta Superblock, okupila je ljude koji su mogli da prime samo signal putem solarnog radija jer svi ostali vidovi komunikacije u tom trenutku nijesu funkcionisali. Džaba svi agregati televizijama kad nijesmo imali đe da upalimo TV aparat. Džaba svi portali svijeta, kad nijesmo imali signala da otvorimo webstranice. Džaba sve digitalne pare ovoga svijeta kada nijeste mogli ni pivo da platite zato što su i automati bili van funkcije.
All that was left in that moment was local context and pure postapocalyptic sense of human vulnerability on this Pale Blue Dot. Think about that when choosing priorities.
O Nama
Nvo Gradionica je relativno mlada nevladina organizacija oformljena 2019. godine sa ciljem promocije i poboljšanja uslova javnih dobara, (ne)materijalne baštine i životne sredine kroz prizmu dizajna, arhitekure, urbanizma, lijepih umjetnosti i IT.
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