The aim of Burning Europe is to create a synergy of intergenerational collaboration - awareness - social cohesion - art - activism – a short film production and photography in 6 different European cities. All seven partners decided to join forces based on their experience with organizing artivism-projects, a fascination for the Burning Man Project and their network in the local community. All partners have organized events in the past where a large group of the local community has been participating. With a Burning Europe pop-up exposition in six different European cities, we want to create a spark for a cross-national collaboration and a sustainable creative productive network in Europe. We will bring photography art of the Burning Man festival of different international artists for free on the streets of Berlin, Reykjavik, Athens, Riga, Amsterdam and Lisbon. In a creative way we will invade these cities with a walking photo-expo surrounded with circus artists, jugglers, hoola hoop dancers and everybody who wants to participate. Afterwards all partners will visit nursing homes to organize a screening with video-footage from the Burning man festival and the pop up-expo in their city. This will be a spark for in depth interviews with seniors for the short film ‘ Burning Europe. ’ By doing so, we would like European citizens to reflect about their dreams, passions, obstacles and solutions. We consider the pop-up exposition as a trigger to bring creative people together with more in-depth activities about artivism. In all cities a workshop with artivists Artur Van Balen, Daniel Hires or Jan Beddegenoodts will bring these people together and learn them about creating awareness by audiovisual art, by tools for action, by a silent climate parade, … . The workshops are conceived as brainstorm sessions about the needs and obstacles in the communities of the participants and about possible solutions. As a result of our project we will produce the short film ' Burning Europe' as an attempt to grasp the era of time different Europeans are living in. Together with the help of all partners we will create this short film, with images of the pop-up expositions and in-depth interviews of youngsters and elderly about their dreams and passions in all these different European cities. More or less 250 people, young and old, will be actively involved to create the pop-up exposition and the production process of the short film. All partners of Burning Europe will try to reach other local youth movements, student organizations, elderly homes by organizing local screenings of the short film. We hope to trigger and inspire a worldwide audience as well when our short film will be released online. After our project we will keep on looking for opportunities to start cross-national collaborations together with all partners and will support any further action they take to create more interaction with elderly, to create awareness and to create sustainable international social networks through artivism.
The last 6 years The non Profit organisation Cameltown have been involved in Artivism projects around the world. After having organised various photo-expositions in gallery’s it was time to leave those white spaces and to retake the streets. We brought High Quality Photography art to the streets for free in a walking parade form. In every city the parade was directed by it’s inhabitants to create a mirror reflecting the era of time. Moving Europe resulted in a cross national inter-generational spark of creativity reaching thousands of people around Europe. Moving Europe was a Collaboration between 7partners from Amsterdam, Berlin, Riga, Reykjavik, Athens and Lisbon to organise walking photo-expositions around Europe. Our parades were triggers to bring people together which resulted in collaborating with various Nursery-homes, Photography & Pole dance classes, Theaters, cinemas, cultural places, bars, festivals & all kind of collectives and random people we’ve met on the street. This explosion of social interaction resulted in the photo-exposition and short film “ there is something about parades”. http://www.cameltown.org/parades As we were the first walking photo-exposition from this scale happening in Europe, all participating organisation gained more visibility and sparked the mindshift towards more future intergenerational cross-national projects. Our project was based on a very simple idea. We brought high quality art for free to the public space collaborating with diverse groups from the local community. We hope that our expo and photo-exposition will ignite more initiatives like these and the Moving Europe network will be there to support upcoming initiatives in Europe and Beyond.