Climate change presents a long-term and formidable challenge to modern society. As the need for mitigation and adaptation becomes increasingly urgent, the role of arts and culture in driving comprehensive societal transformation cannot be overstated. The RE-IMAGINE Green Art Practices on the Margin is one of the pioneering European cooperation projects (supported through the Creative Europe fund of the European Union) that seeks to redefine the social role of performing arts organizations as agents of environmental change. The project is implemented in partnership between Green Art Incubator (Serbia), Arte Urbana Collectif (Bulgaria), Lokomotiva (North Macedonia), and Pro Progressione (Hungary). It aims to build capacities within organizations and professionals in the performing arts to achieve goals related to reducing CO2 emissions and achieving zero-waste production, among others. By fostering internal changes in working practices, the project also aspires to bring about a significant shift in the external actions of the performing arts sector, contributing to global efforts to combat climate change. The project gathers civil society organizations working in Serbia, North Macedonia, Hungary, and Bulgaria as examples of peripherality in the performing arts – both in geopolitical and sectoral terms – which makes the question of their green transformation even more complex and challenging. In this sense, by strengthening the capacity of such a target group, RE-IMAGINE outcome becomes the model of support for the adoption of environmentally sustainable work procedures for organizations on the margin that run their operations in turbulent and specific socio-economic contexts and that are already burdened by the difficulties of their own sustainability.
Emerging from the given framework, the objective of the project is fourfold and refers to:
1) Enabling the capacity building of partner organizations through internationalization and adoption of new and expansion of existing knowledge and practices in the context of promotion and education about green transformation
2) Providing education and building capacities of 12 third-party organizations on the topic of ecologically sustainable art practices through a unique residency program Re-Imagine Green. The project primarily targets artists, producers, managers, and curators of art organizations, who will become green ambassadors, i.e. capable of initiating the process of green transformation within their organizations
3) Supporting green knowledge transfer between different field actors in partner countries – strengthening networking activities related to the green transformation process and enabling peer-to-peer learning in this context
4) Raising awareness and affirmation of the importance of the climate change mitigation and adaptation process in the general public.
https://re-imagine-project.eu
From July 24th to July 28th, the second residency of the RE-IMAGINE project, Sustainable Preproduction, was held in Hungary. Organized by Pro Progressione, this residency brought together participants and project partners to explore various topics related to green transformation in the performing arts sector within the framework of the preproduction
In April 2024, the vibrant city of Sofia hosted the first residency of the Re-Imagine project, titled Climate Literacy, organized by Arte Urbana Collectif. This event brought together 24 participants, professionals in the performing arts field, from 12 organizations and informal collectives across four partner countries of the project –
In December 2023, Green Art Incubator, in collaboration with partner organizations Lokomotiva Skopje, Arte Urbana Collectif, and Pro Progressione, organized the first of the main activities of the two-year RE-IMAGINE project – the Green Education and Narrative in Performing Arts Training for Trainers. This online training aimed to build the
