We promote socially engaged arts by connecting social, educational and artistic fields at the national and international level. We are proud to have carried out numerous projects all aiming to explore innovative ways of social inclusion and contribute to social transformation through the language of arts. In the last few years, our main focus has been on underprivileged youth. Our aim is to give these young people a chance to step out of their tight realities and meet new people, concepts and methods. For this end, we participate in the creation of international youth worker exchanges, such as our Academy for Actors of Civil Change project, strategic partnerships for youth such as ACADEMY+, and socially engaged Creative Europe projects such as What’SAP, as well as online conferences such as the @cademy Conference. Our mission under this pillar is to change the perception on Social Art Practices and consolidate it as a profession in Europe and beyond.
As a liberal arts student, I have always been fascinated by the capacity of artworks to change the interpreter, to interrogate and overwrite already settled patterns of thought. The socially engaged, art-based, participatory and collaborative interventions of PP’s Social pillar harness art’s potential for change to alter our social reality, and I’m glad to be able to contribute to this work.
PERFARE “PERforming arts to promote social welfARE access in Europe”wants to contribute to the Culture strand’s objective “2 –Innovation” by mapping, capitalising and further transferring European good practices in the field of the cross-fertilisation opportunities between the (performing) arts activities and health and social care services delivered by the Welfare systems of the partners’ territories involved.
Project CREATIVE AGORA promotes the European dimension in non-formal, participatory arts education for adults for Europe’s disadvantaged and diverse communities.
The Anti-Bullying Movement Series is an international partnership with the aim to use arts and culture to find new ways for dealing with bullying in young, underrepresented populations. As an adult education project, it is intended to further develop the competencies of youth workers, educators, educational leaders, and artists who are actively working with at-risk youth. The programs organized under the partnership introduce methodologies that use art as a tool, which can allow professionals to detect and handle certain behavioral tendencies in their communities before they could fester into bullying.
The V4-SAP project is focusing on Social Art Practices in the V4 region. This project has some interrelated components with our ongoing Academy for Actors of Civil Change project, but it is independent from it. Our goal with the V4-SAP project is to implement in the V4 region knowledge and best practices harvested from our already running Academy.
On 2nd October, Pro Progressione has organised its first large-scale digital conference titled @cademy Conference: Social art practices in the digital era.
The idea for ACADEMY+ was born from the common projects of the partners in the field of youth and socially engaged art practices. Its aim is to further develop the methods used by them in their daily work through joint brainstorming, testing and regular feedback, and to make the creative development of disadvantaged young people even more effective by coordinating and combining the four methods.
We organize yearly our Summer Academy Erasmus+ programme, which focuses on social change as the title shows. The 2-weeks training programme invites professionals of social and educational fields coming from 8 different countries from all over Europe and provide them the opportunity to learn formal and non-formal artistic methods and put the newly gained knowledge into practice with the help of professional advisers.
FAR – Fight Against Radicalisation was an international training for artists, youth workers, young pedagogues, social workers and volunteers who believe that art can be a powerful tool toward social change. The aim of the project was to find different artistic tools that can raise awareness around radicalisation. The project was a collaboration between four European partners. In the framework of the FAR project we were implementing a youth exchange which was result in a series of participatory workshops for high-school students and a thematic festival.
Play! MOBILE aimed to encourage cultural participation in the micro regions of Europe. We believe that community art practice, the creation of modifiable site-specific installations and the development of a participatory game as a platform for interaction between artist-artifact and public, offers a sophisticated and inclusive way for capacity building and the development of new audiences. By turning public spaces of the visited settlements into playgrounds of contemporary art, we aimed to create an alternative way of cultural consumption, a methodology to present contemporary artworks without the necessity of having all the satisfactory infrastructure.
EXCEPT was a 2 years long Europe-wide program with six directly involved countries (Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Serbia and Hungary). The project EXCEPT aimed to start up the tradition of social theatre in Europe by knowledge transfer between European theatrical companies.
Our Summer Academy for Non-Formal Youth Practices aimed to address the challenges taking place in the education of underprivileged children from remote areas, facing a lack of basic human competence. Based on the recognition that stage is an exceptionally effective asset of community building, our core team established new ways of social work through arts and culture to work with the disadvantaged youth.
