Arts Collaboratory is a programme for the support of visual artist-run initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and for exchange between these and visual arts organisations in the Netherlands. It provides financial support, facilitates knowledge sharing, and promotes networking and artistic exchange.
Arts Collaboratory is a very loose network/forum of 20-50 individual partners which from time to time focally tighten around a specific theme or activity. Any artist-run initiative can apply for funding and artistic exchange.
Funding opportunities for visual artist-run initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America can be either for one-off small scale support up to € 10.000 or larger proposals involving more funds and lasting one to three years. Support is highly flexible and can be provided for embryonic initiatives, programme development, profiling activities, capacity development, professionalizing the organisation, and/or widening audience outreach.
Regarding artistic exchange, Arts Collaboratory engages in a variety of knowledge-sharing activities. In addition to moderating discussions under the Arts Collaboratory Web Forum, organising regional meetings, and pro-actively linking partners up with each other, Arts Collaboratory offers small-scale financial support to special projects that enhance knowledge-generation, -sharing and –utilisation on a variety of themes. At the moment these themes include Adding the Plural to History, Improving Cultural Management, and Methods & Content of Pedagogical Art Practice. At different points in time interested partners (3-5) take the initiative by working together on a node of content submitting joint projects to the Steering Group of Arts Collaboratory. We challenge partners to come up with interesting project proposals that are innovative in content, form or outreach, and that involve artists from different countries.
Arts Collaboratory financially supports artistic exchange, both South-South exchange, and exchange between visual artist-run initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America with cultural organisations in the Netherlands. This international exchange can include presentations of artistic work by Arts Collaboratory partners in both the South and in the Netherlands. Other possibilities include the financing of development and execution costs of joint projects . Orientation visits and participation in a visitor’s programme (to the Netherlands) can also be funded. The aim is real meaningful exchange in all directions.
Arts Collaboratory was established in January 2007 by Hivos and DOEN Foundation, and is carried out in cooperation with the Mondriaan Foundation. These three Dutch organisations have joined forces (pooling resources, knowledge and networks) in Arts Collaboratory to achieve greater effectiveness, efficiency and synergies. The Steering Group of Arts Collaboratory is comprised of representatives of Hivos, DOEN Foundation and the Mondriaan Foundation. Exchange with the Netherlands is facilitated and financially supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.
The mission of Arts Collaboratory is to encourage artistic innovation of outstanding quality that is firmly embedded in society by contributing to a sustainable, open (inter)national visual arts sector, whereby artists-led initiatives play a decisive role in the artistic direction of the programme.
The objectives of Arts Collaboratory are fourfold:
- To improve the quality of artistic expression by artists-led initiatives;
- To promote the development of, and reflection on, (new forms of) interaction with the general public and the social embedding of the artists-led initiatives;
- To promote meaningful intercultural exchange in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and between the Netherlands and Asia, Africa and Latin Amercia, among the artists-led initiatives;
- To strengthen the cultural infrastructure for the independent visual arts sector.
