Creative & free writing

Promoting creative thinking and writing is an important part of the intangible culture strand of Creative Europe. Projects in these priority areas are closely aligned with the European Commission's Diversity, Inclusion and Immigration agenda. Their humanist ethos is underpined as an answer on the perceived threat of nationalist, populist and right-wing forces.

Average project titles: “Meet the Neighbours”, “Eu Collective Plays!”, “Borderline Offensive: Laughing in the face of fear”, “Engage! Young producers building bridges to a freer word”, “Socially inclusive literature operation”, “Imagine 2020 (2.0) - Art, ecology & possible futures”.

The “Meet the Neighbours” project questioned the role of the artist in changing post-industrial environments, and developed capacity for artists “to directly engage with their citizen neighbours, producing work that built immediate relationships with local life”. The project provides participants with prefabricated concepts as follows: 1) “Neighbourliness: The practice of being a neighbour. Neighbourliness is political. People power. Art-washing”. 2) “Migration: Cities becoming more international”. 3) “Populism. It’s a common term in our era. Resurgence of right-wing policy. Associated with neoliberalism. The dead hand of the market. Populism pits ordinary against experts. Puts artists in difficult position”.

Social fring is also in the center in the “Socially Inclusive Literary Action Project"[1], aiming to make European literature accessible to: refugees, hospital patients, young adults, prisoners, secondary school students, the elderly. The project prefers to use provocative titles like “poetry workshop for haters”, to assure young people that that they won’t be attending a “snobby, esoteric event for intellectual poetry lovers” and to attract them to participate.

With a wider social impact, the “Re-build Refuge Europe” project proposes artistic and cultural activities that build bridges between refugees, migrants and "locals". These include storytelling workshops in refugee camps, but also more spontaneously "deep face-to-face exchanges between locals and refugees that build relationships of trust". The same project concludes that “after nearly 40 years of progressive neoliberalisation and social decomposition, contemporary politics has been very publicly upended by a misogynistic, xenophobic and financially privileged «new right» intent on coupling its politics of hate onto the apparatus of state power. It is the cultural role and duty of Europe to welcome refugees properly and to allow for cultural hybridisation to happen”.

In this thematic cluster, diction is hateful, whilst advocating inclusion and understanding. It transforms poetry and literature into ideological pamphlets that impose collective guilt on Europeans for being misogynists, xenophobes and the like. Free writing becomes a therapeutic tool for inventing communities only connected by hatred towards imagined ennemies.

Terminology and idioms:

• Neighbourliness
• Art-washing
• Populism pits ordinary against experts
• A snobby, esoteric event for intellectual poetry lover
• Poetry workshop for haters
• A misogynistic, xenophobic and financially privileged “new right”
• Deep face-to-face exchanges between locals and refugees
• Cultural hybridisation of Europe as a duty