93
participating and approximately 240 exhibitions organised, accompanied by concerts,
contemporary dance and poetry performances.
Every year, at least 35 exhibitions are organised in the 8 spaces of the festival in 5
Lithuanian cities. The exhibitions, involving local and international artists, are visited
by an average of 45.000 people annually —about 6.000 visitors in Kaunas.
Approximately 10 Lithuanian artists —mainly painters— and 8-10 artists from
various European countries participate every year in the different activities. Each
artist is offered a series of 3 solo exhibitions in 3 different spaces of the festival, plus
the final group exhibition inVilnius’Town Hall. Since 2012, a short artist-in-residence
(AiR) in the form of symposium and/or painting plein-air activities has been held in
Kaunas.
In 2014, the festival introduced painting workshops for pupils of local art schools in
its programme of activities.The objective was dual: to attract more young people to
visual arts and to increase the publicity of the project. These workshops reached
about 150 teenagers in 4 cities.
Success/ failure factors:
Factors of success:
•
Synergy strategy and working methodologies
•
Ability of the project’s administration personnel to gather the necessary funds;
•
High professionalism and adequate work qualities of the project team;
Professional artists; Interesting and well-preserved spaces.
•
An active local arts and culture community.
Obstacles:
•
Kaunas is more a business-oriented city
•
Some of the exhibition spaces are only partly adapted to the needs of the
exhibitions or open to the public only during the touristic season.
•
Difficulty to motivate artists to exhibit in small provincial towns where
audience is reduced.
•
Limited financial resources
n
Pardubice
The Automatic Cultural Mills
Topic:
Arts for social cohesion, wellbeing and social innovation
Country:
Czech Republic
City context:
The industrial city of Pardubice has 85.979 inhabitants
58
. Its main
economic activities are traditionally oriented towards electronics and the chemical
industry, the sector now being organised within branch clusters linked to local key
players such as the University of Pardubice — or R&D centres.
58
On January 1
st
2014 according to the National Registers Authority, Register of inhabitants of the Czech
Republic.
