Cultural NGOs in Europe are taking their civic responsibility to mitigate the spread of COVID19 by suspending events and travels. Whether employed or freelance, workers in the cultural sector, who are often in an already precarious situation, are now facing a sudden and dramatic loss of income.
Supporting an appeal by PEARLE* and others they urge all governments to adopt emergency measures that may adequately support the sustainability of the cultural sector.
ietm announced the cancelation of the 2020 Tromsø Plenary Meeting which was scheduled 30 April 2020 to 03 May.
President Asa Ruchardsdottir writes in a personal message: “We have had long dialogues with our partners in Norway and we have already started to imagine how we could host key sessions via digital means and possibly, smaller gatherings of members. We will update you with more information as soon as we can.”
In the run-up to the special meeting of the European Council on February 20, 2020 and on the occasion of the #ActforCulture Action Day on February 17, 2020, eight cultural organizations in Germany, coordinated by the European Music Council, made an appeal to Minister of Culture Grütters, Federal Minister of Finance Scholz and Minister of State Roth from the German Federal Foreign Office. The ITI and the IGBK as members of the European Secretariat of German Culture NGOs also signed the call. Continue reading “EU 2021-2027: call for an adequate budget for culture in funding programmes”
Culture Action Europe has published an extensive report on its 2019 Beyond the Obvious conference “Culture Crops: cultural practices in non-urban territories”, that took place in Konstanz/ Kreuzlingen end of October 2019. Read the full report of the conference on the Culture Action Europe Website here.
The purpose of the Culture Crops conference was to go “Beyond the Obvious”, developing a more comprehensive approach towards culture and cultural and artistic practices in peripheral and non-urban areas. Practically, this included walking the territories, visiting local initiatives and engaging in dialogue with cultural actors from other projects, but with similar challenges from across Europe.
On 23 November 2019, IAA Europe’s 15th General Assembly took place in Bratislava/ Slovakia. As already decided at the General Assembly last year, the Presidency of IAA Europe was handed over to Andrea Kristek Kozárová from the Slovak Union of Visual Artists (SUVA).
The day before the assembly, on 22 November 2019, the conference “Legal and social statutes of artists in Europe – 30 years after the Velvet Revolution: Focus on the Directive (EU) 2019/790 on Copyright in the digital Single Market” was organised by IAA Europe, supported by the Norwegian Collecting Society KOPINOR. National implementations of the so called EU-Digital-Single-Market-Directive were discussed as well as its impact for IAA Europe members from EFAT/EWR countries. The General Assembly adopted a resolution on the implementation of the Directive for an appropriate and proportionate remuneration of visual artists in Europe.
Read the conference program and full text of the resolution on the IAA Europe Website.
Culture Action Europe calls for securing a sustainable future for the European non-profit cultural sector. The statement from November 15 says, that the new application of financial assessment rules “actively prevents organisations in the cultural and creative sectors from accessing EU funding – particularly in specific EU countries where national regulations do not permit non-profit organisations to keep the reserves needed to be rated financially ‘strong’ by the EU – endangering a sizable percentage of cooperation projects and European networks.”
Following a 2018 introduced new matrix for the financial capacity of cultural organisations, 27 organisations selected for small and large Creative Europe cooperation projects starting in 2019 were assessed as “financially weak” and informed that they would not receive an advance payment for their projects unless they could produce a bank or third-party guarantee.
The European cultural sector is primarily made up of non-profit micro-organisations and is a powerful contributor to each priority of the EU Strategic Agenda 2019-2024. For all future programmes in the fields of culture, education, innovation, youth and sport CAE demands the implementation of a clause according to Regulation no 1288/2013 establishing Erasmus+, Article 19.3: “In addition to public bodies and higher education institutions, organisations in the fields of education, training, youth and sport that have received over 50% of their annual revenue from public sources over the last two years shall be considered as having the necessary financial, professional and administrative capacity to carry out activities under the Programme.”
The matrix for the assessment of the financial capacity of applicants must be reviewed to make sure that programmes are accessible to the full diversity of cultural operators in Europe, which are overwhelmingly represented by micro-entities.
