The EU4Culture Network Festival united Eastern countries through a two-day event in Gori that showcased city diversity and allowed artists from different countries to collaborate on joint projects.
Implemented four years ago, EU4Culture is a project that supports 14 non-capital cities in Eastern partnership countries including Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus. During that time, the project gave mobility grants to over 400 beneficiaries, allowing them to travel to European countries to work with professionals and exchange experiences. The project closed with the event, ‘EU4Culture Network Festival: City Stories, Diverse Voices – Action.’
The festival’s co-curator, Maka Chkhaidze, says the event reflected and summarized the work that was carried out. Most of the participants were grantees of the project, although there were also some civil society organizations present. The two-day event, open to the public, featured panels, dance performances, audio-visual events, public talks, workshops, film screenings, and more, showcasing the diversity of the artists and their given mediums.
‘Cities’ was coined as the festival’s main theme because, according to Chkhaidze, EU4Culture focuses on decentralizing cultural processes and their promotion in regional cities.
“Often, these processes occur somewhat underground and remain beyond the sight of a wider audience,” she notes.
The festival participants were artists with works across numerous mediums that expressed their experiences with their city and the environment in which they lived- from Gori, Kutaisi, Poti, Zugdidi, Batumi and Tbilisi, to cities in Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus, and Azerbaijan.
The closing festival did not only take place in Georgia. EU4Cutlure Network Manager Rusudan Ebralidze says the first festival happened in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, followed by the one in Gori, and there are to be fests in Armenia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan. She says each country has the same festival name, with a different ‘subheading’ (Georgia’s was ‘Action’), with specific topics or themes that are related to the people who live there.
“These are actions we take with the aim of changing something, be it option, the current situation, or the situation in the future,” Ebralidze says.
A key aspect of the festival is collaboration.
Natia Bunturi is a Georgian dancer with a base in classical ballet who has been doing more contemporary ballet since 2012. She currently serves as a freelance dancer and guest at different theaters, doing choreography and dance performances on her own or with other artists. She is also a grantee of the EU4Culture project, given to develop her and her partner’s house in Dusheti which will serve as an art residency and performance art space for others.
Bunturi notes that while they are still creating the property, they already have a ‘Forest stage’ where they hold performances, and hthey ave been working on a 12-month film and dance project called ‘Project 12’ which will be screened in the springtime.
During the festival, Bunturi collaborated with Azerbaijani grantee recipient Ibrahim Babayev. He is a professional player on the Azerbaijani folk musical instrument, Tar, who combines its sound with electronic music. The two of them had a live performance, combining their city narratives.
Bunturi said she searched for legendary artistic people in Georgia, specifically Gori where the performance was, to draw inspiration. She found Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili and singer Marro Tarkhnishvili who performed for her first time in Gori. Bunturi obtained the copyright for Tarkhnishvili’s music, then turned it into a skeleton which Babayev used to combine his music for the performance.
During their performance, Bunturi noted there was a very wide atmosphere, rather than a traditional theatre stage. She said they thoroughly observed their location and used it to its full extent.
“We used every surface, every big statue, big sculpture in the area, some people used it all. It wasn’t just a lit stage area that dancers used,” Bunturi told GEORGIA TODAY. “It was a wider perspective of bringing physicality into the wide outdoor stage, being amongst the public, and being very close to them. That was a very impactful situation.”
This was the first festival implemented since the start of the EU4Culture project. Ebralidze says that for it being held in a regional city of Georgia and the artists not yet having prominent names, there was a good turnout of around 500 attendees. She hopes that even after the project ends later this year, the grantees will take the lead and continue to organize the festival themselves.
The greatest impact of the EU4Culture project was the adoption of new policy documents by municipalities and respected institutions in the participating regional cities, allowing for a vision of how culture should be developed through the next four or six years in these areas.
“Even though stakeholders or those from the private sector have a different vision for how culture should develop in each city, they have agreed to work together on the documents to reach the desired goals stated in the strategy documents,” Ebralidze notes.
The project has also helped cultural professionals from non-capital cities who didn’t have the self-confidence to ask for financial assistance or write application letters in English.
“I hope that people can take their knowledge and talent and stay in the towns they are from and grow the local cultural scene, rather than leave and move to the capital,” Ebralidze says.
14 regional cities prepared culture development strategies, seven of which were given financial support to implement the strategies’ activities. The project, running until year-end, was implemented by four cultural institutes: Goethe Institute, Czech Centers, the French Institute in Georgia, and the Danish Cultural Institute.
“Thanks to the participating artists, artistic projects, and guests, a truly rich and diverse story was created, where each participant’s voices resonated clearly,” Chkhaidze notes.
By Shelbi R. Ankiewicz
