ECHO Academies is a programme of artistic creation, heritage exploration and support for artists. ECHO Academies was not born yesterday. In 2018 Inter Alia created the ECHO: European Cultural Heritage Onstage project, which aimed to explore the dark Balkan heritage through the visual arts. Subsequently, ECHO II: Traditions in Transition approached local traditions in Balkan communities. In ECHO III: For Memory’s Sake, young artists from Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania travelled into the recent past of our societies and created theatre, literature, music and video art inspired by arranged marriages, the status of women, gender inequalities. ECHO’s journey has emphatically demonstrated the need to support and highlight young artists and their work in a cultural environment with limited opportunities and compressed rewards. The ECHO Academies, was created with this very purpose: to empower emerging artists who have so far not had the right opportunities to showcase their talent and work.
“ECHO Academies ” is an arts project that aims to foster young and emerging European talents in the fields of comics, fashion design, music, photography and architecture by using heritage as a means and inspiration for their work.
Given the experience of “ECHO: European Cultural Heritage Onstage”, “ECHO II: Traditions in Transition”, and ECHO III: For Memory’s Sake the project tries to tackle the issues of visibility, networking, employability and opportunities to enter the art market for new European talents. When it comes to the use of heritage as an inspirational tool, It builds on the values of the European (European Year of Cultural Heritage and its legacy, New European Bauhaus) and glocal and critical perceptions of heritage.
Aims
“ECHO Academies” attempts to:
1) Cultivate young and emerging European talents from the fields of arts and the CCS in order to enhance resilience.
2) Offer training opportunities and build capacities for artists and CCS professionals in order to improve employability.
3) Create networks between artists and CCS professionals with the art market, and 4) Promote artists and their work on the international level in order to increase opportunities and outreach.
Target Groups
ECHO Academies tries to benefit
a) new, talented artists from European countries, with a wide geographical range, through creative work, cultivation of skills, and promotion of their work,
b) CCS professionals by building their capacities and offering them training opportunities,
c) micro organizations to develop pilot projects with a focus on building partnerships of cross-national cooperation and income generation
Heritage Elements
Activities
Artistic Academies: Four Academies in Greece (comics), Bulgaria (fashion design), North Macedonia (music), Hungary (photography and architecture) involving a total of 40 new/emerging talents (10 per Academy) from Western Balkan and EU countries. Each Academy will award 3 artists.
Pilot Projects: Winning artists from the Academies will be called to implement a pilot project in collaboration with a micro-organisation
Capacity Building Activities: The project will offer artists and professionals from the cultural and creative sector a series of seminars on specific topics in order to support them with new tools, skills and experiences on how to innovate, prosper and monetise their work.
Connection of Artists with the Market: The project will offer artists connected with the project networking activities that will connecting them with the national, European and international markets.
Partner Organisations
INTER ALIA, Greece
OPEN SPACE FOUNDATION, Bulgaria Partner
SFERA INTERNATIONAL North Macedonia
PRO PROGRESSIONE, Hungary
CUMEDIAE, Belgium
