Page 16 - Re-imagining our Region

14 RE-IMAGINING OUR REGION
To demonstrate how our Regional Cultural Strategy and Three Sisters Programme are aligned and integrated as part of the same development process, we have commissioned
a €90,000 programme of six demonstration projects. These are to initiate tangible actions which build capacity, enhance collaboration and build the research and evidence base. With each project having at least one European partner, they also demonstrate our capacity to deliver our engagement with a wider European agenda, show the seriousness of our plans, and enable us to grow our cultural sector through collabora- tion in the lead up to 2020 rather than relying on one year for the transformations we all yearn.
table 2
Our demonstration projects are featured in brief below and re ected on throughout this Bid
Building our digital capacity - eDIGIREGION
eDIGIREGION is an ongoing collaborative project that brings together four research-driven clusters in the European regions of South East Ireland, Central Hungary, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain and Bucharest-Ilfov, Romania. The aim of eDIGIREGION is to plan, design and implement an ecosystem of research, innovation, creativity and com- mercialisation that supports the implementation of the EU Digital Agenda in each region. As we build toward 2020, it will be expanded to include new European partners and will be a connector to our activities across the cultural and creative industries and as we seek to build digital capacity across the cultural sector.
Re-imagining the European Region – Three Sisters Mapping Project
The Three Sisters Mapping Project is an interactive ‘py- schogeographical’ mapping project to reveal patterns and connections between cultural organisations across the Three Sisters Region and Europe; create a coherent image of the hard and soft connections within the region; and
to highlight connections and patterns which traverse the usual boundaries of identity and place. It has worked as an R&D activity to scope the real and imagined boundaries
of identity and place and to explore how we can maximise existing and emergent connections within the region and across Europe.
Cultural cooperation
– the Three Sisters Experiment
This project trialled an audience exchange activity where three participating venues (National Opera House, Wex- ford, Theatre Royal, Waterford, and Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny) brought 50 of their core audience to theatre per- formance in each of the other venues. This is a prototype for culture-led rural mobility and joined-up approaches to audience development and programming.
Age and Space:
Collaborative Design Workshops
This project mobilised people to participate and in uence their environment through collaborative design processes. This involved: Youth Urban Space Workshops – a collabo- rative design and build workshop to activate public space for young people in Callan (a small rural town); and Nimble Spaces - an enabling design pro¬cess that supported adults with a disability to work creatively with artists and architects through design collaborations and workshops.
Active Participation for the Three Sisters Generation – The Young Folk
Is a collaborative project tailored for young people (Tran- sition Year students across the region). Working together in a process of creative engagement through technichal workshops, the programme will culminate in a live show produced by the participants. It has created a network of young people interested in music and stage production within our region, trained in the technical aspects of pro- duction and performance and presenting opportunities for creative careers for these young people by 2020.
Toward a Festival of Festivals – Morbid and Sons
Kilkenny Arts Festival, Wexford Festival Opera and Water- ford Spraoi Festival are working together for the rst time, combing their skills in opera, arts and street spectacle
to co-create Morbid and Sons, a new generation of Irish street arts performance incorporating music. This includes active partnership links with festivals in the UK, France and Spain. It is the foundation of a new co-operation model for festivals across the region (our ‘Festival of Festivals’) which will create ambitious work in 2020. The project nurtures new ideas, developing cross-region capacity and cooper- ation which will open up future opportunities for more ex- tensive partnership activities across the region over time.