Common grounds, common future - Ideas in dialogue
copyright by Irina Radu
INTRO
How will we manage the current challenges
in culture and society together?
Thats exactly the question, that #newTogether is focusing on by strengthening the dialogue and the collaboration between cultural actors from Austria and Romania.
Designed as a complex process, this project will be deployed over several years and levels, in order to encourage the creation of constant and lasting links, between CREATIVE AUSTRIANS and ROMANIANS.
#newTogether is addressing representatives of a wide range of professions: visual arts, performing arts, literature, digital arts, new technologies etc.
Its goal is to facilitate the creation and implementation of bilateral projects by 2023 (year of Timişoara European Capital of Culture), which can continue and develop beyond this milestone.
The horrific, incomprehensible events in Ukraine and Russia make it dramatically clear how important it is right now to strengthen cohesion, civil society commitment and democracy in order to create crisis-resistant societies.
The crisis engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the atomization of society is worsening, while social bonds can easily evaporate.
Fostering the cultural relations between Austria and Romania - two countries with an immense common historical heritage - #newTogether aims to prove, on the contrary, that CREATIVE AUSTRIANS and ROMANIANS are precisely those who have the strength to reverse this trend.
copyright by Aleksandra Pawloff
VISIONS BY BEATE WINKLER
The exhibition "Transforming" by Beate Winkler will open in Autumn 2021 at Jecza Gallery Timişoara.
The European and in Austria living artist Beate Winkler will display different types of her work which are closely linked to transition processes: she involves her paintings in processes of change. They are partly controlled by her, and partly exposed to influences out of control. In her art, she integrates the symbol of the blank paper and she works mainly with "old material" like handmade paper and ink. She rolls her papers in and out – lifting them into sky, nailing them on walls in different ways and formats – or installing small painted books on the wall of the exhibition venue.
Her credo is to trust in changing processes, in changing our perspectives, in changing our way of thinking and acting.
Beate Winkler develops an interaction with the visitors of her exhibition and participants of the project related workshops. She explains e.g. in a letter the need for visions and asked the visitors to write or to paint their dream or hope for a new TOGETHER on a small painting by her. Once dropped in a "Box for the Future", all these written or painted dreams and hopes (a word, a sentence, a symbol or a painting) will be displayed at the National Theatre/Sala 2, a prominent public space in the centre of Timişoara as part of a "common vision for a new TOGETHER".
This interaction in Timişoara will last longer than the exhibition and shall continue till the end of 2022.
At the end of the project all the contributions of the participants to this project, all the collected visions for a new TOGETHER will be documented in a "Book of visions for a new TOGETHER" and integrated in Timișoara 2023 - European Capital of Culture.
THE DOCUMENTARY
Carmen Lidia Vidu,
theater and documentary film director
"#newTogether is a necessary project.
It's a form of dialogue in isolation;
it's a testimony about the Zero Moment.
Our fragility, vulnerability and fear became a universal language that we all spoke in 2020, the year of the covid-19 pandemic.
People isolated themselves, time stood still and a "new together" began."
OPEN CALL
Austrian-Romanian dialogue project
for culture and society
The Austrian Cultural Forum in Bucharest invites submissions from established and emerging artists, researchers and artist groups from Austria from a wide range of sectors and connecting fields, including but not limited to: visual, audio, performative, and digital arts, multi- and trans-media projects, social and community art projects, literature, etc.
The purpose of the call is to create a pool of innovative and daring bilateral collaborative projects in the framework of the Timișoara European Capital of Culture 2023 cultural programme.
The selected project proposals will be implemented in different venues across Romania starting in 2021, and up to and including 2023. They will also be integrated in the final #newTogether project documentation targeting political representatives at national and European levels.
Another outcome we expect from this process is to foster lasting collaborations and connections between Austrian and Romanian cultural partners and actors in the field of new technologies, which can further prove their resilience beyond the 2023 milestone.
Timeline
