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Description
The project necessity is a consequence of: 1. Share of cultural employment in Romania (1.6%) is far below the EU average (3.8%); 2. Local arts universities focus on having students master their craft. Their curriculum lacks courses about the professional environment of visual arts - an ecosystem that students need to know in order to become active professionals in it. By contrast, most success stories on the international scene reveal the contemporary artist as being more than a creator; he/she is at the heart of an entire network of collaborations with other professionals and of direct engagement with the audience, both aspects requiring additional knowledge; 3. Local audience has a low cultural participation: 62% of Romanians have never been to a museum or a gallery in 2018, according to the Cultural Consumption Barometer. A mentorship and production program for emerging artists, ACCELERATOR addresses the gap in formal art education and the low cultural participation by transferring knowledge from a scene where these skills and information exist (the Icelandic one), by supporting artistic research focused on the idea of community and by enabling artists to create and exhibit new work based on this research, including public art commissions. The project follows the current practice of using online channels to make art more accessible, by creating content specifically for this medium, and is sensitive to a contemporary interpretation of public art as being context-specific rather than site-specific, which implies a notion of the community as the site and the artist as one whose work is responsive to its issues. The partnership with i8 makes possible the transfer of know-how and best practices from the gallery’s staff and other experts from Iceland (including mentors for the artists), on one hand, and the applicant’s team and Romanian artists, on the other.