YEAD

Since 2015, the CVB has been at the head of a group of six associations based in Europe (France, Italy, Portugal, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium) who decided to pool their experiences and skills to think about and work on the question of the relationship between youth, diversity and cultural institutions.

Working with young adults in the fields of audiovisual and socio-cultural work, we firmly believe that artistic practices play an important role in social inclusion and emancipation. We are convinced that cultural diversity should feed into cultural policies and structures in Europe.

For four years now, we have set up video workshops for young adults to invite them to question their relationship to culture, their participation, or not, in cultural life and the way in which cultural institutions approach diversity issues. The medium used – video – aims to encourage these young Europeans, often estranged from the field of creativity, to become active members of cultural life by creating culture rather than just being on the receiving end.

In tandem with the video workshops taking place locally or bilaterally, YEAD also organises mini-seminars for culture professionals in each country on how to develop their relationship with young people, how to establish a cultural programme that reflects today’s diversity of cultures, and what can be changed in our relationship to culture. These one-day meetings serve to create closer ties between cultural spaces interested by these issues. Together we hope to identify what young people do, lack, need and dream about and question the existing relationships between cultural offer and audience as it stands.

The YEAD project will conclude with a festival in July 2019, bringing together 84 young people from 12 European countries. They will be asked to summarise what YEAD has taught them and the good practices they have learnt, with a focus on 12 cultural spaces in Brussels.