Creative Europe / Platform Magic Carpets , led by “Kaunas Biennial”, a partner of “Kaunas 2022” which was included in the bidding programme of “Kaunas 2022”, has also been granted financial support of 2 000 000 Eur through the Creative Europe programme. The production of final exhibition of “MagiC Carpets” (curator Benedetta Carpi de Resmini / Rome, Italy), which is confirmed as a part of the “Novi Sad 2021” and “Kaunas 2022” main programmes, will cost around 200 000 Eur (direct impact on “Kaunas 2022” programme), including a catalogue and communication. Other expenditure is spread among 15 European partner organisations from 15 EU and non-EU countries in order to boost careers of emerging talents – artists and curators – in the field of community engagement and public art forms. The project will reach more than 70 residencies implemented with more than 300 artists involved and participation of more than 3 000 active community members across Europe. Direct impact on Kaunas and Lithuanian creative industries from this project is around 500 000 Eur (documentary team, media agencies, production of exhibition, catalogue, 7 residencies with productions, 5 staff members for running the platform, etc.).

Impact of residencies happening in Kaunas and Kaunas District in relation to “Kaunas 2022” Community programme is at least 150 000 Eur per period. Thus, the total financial input of “Magic Carpets” platform to the ECoC programme amounts to 350 000,00 Eur.

E-marketing of priority tourism development regions / E-marketing project

From December 2019, “Kaunas 2022” together with Kaunas City Municipality will implement an animation “E-marketing housing for cultural and natural heritage objects in the lower reaches of the Nemunas”.

The project aims to promote the visit of cultural heritage sites on the lower banks of the Nemunas, local and inbound tourism in the riverside areas of Kaunas city and Kaunas district, to promote visiting and knowledge of cultural heritage sites, to form an attractive and modern tourist image of Kaunas city and Kaunas district by creating an innovative cognitive tourism tool.

The project implements the dissemination of the knowledge on heritage objects in Kaunas city and Kaunas district municipalities. During the project, it is planned to create an interactive tour of experiences (mobile application), promoting the knowledge of the lower Nemunas heritage objects, in which virtual reality and augmented reality technologies will be implemented. An online site will also be created, presenting the created interactive tour and the heritage objects included in it. The project is focused on the tourist segments of Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Russia and Belarus.

At this moment public procurement procedure for mobile application is in progress.

The value of the project is 243 969,73 Eur.

Horizon 2020 / T-Factor

“T-Factor”. Public institution „Kaunas 2022” together with 24 partners were granted the European Commission H2020 Environment & Resources project “T-Factor: Unleashing future-facing urban hubs through culture and creativity-led strategies of transformative time”.

“T-Factor” challenges the waiting time in urban regeneration, i. e., the time in-between the adoption of the masterplan and its actual realization – to demonstrate how culture, creative collaboration and wide engagement can unleash vibrant urban hubs of inclusive urban (re)generation, social innovation and enterprise. The project targets early stage regenerations in a diversity of historic urban areas in London, Bilbao, Amsterdam, Kaunas, Milan and Lisbon, and provides their PPPs with a unique ecosystem of capacity-building for radically new city-making approaches. Leveraging local coalitions of actors, we will use the masterplans of the targeted regenerations as the starting point to steer collective inquiry into their meanings and narratives, co-create visions of future spaces, and put them on stage via meanwhile uses and experiences. Throughout the process, culture and creativity will support voice and engagement, and help enrich and steer the masterplans towards heritage and culture-relevant innovation and enterprise, and social and cultural integration. Via trans-disciplinary action research, we will keep track of change, and build on the insights to add iteratively new layers of collective reflection and action. This learning by making will continuously inform masterplans and PPPs, consolidating, adjusting and providing new directions of urban development rooted in shared goals of sustainable city-making. “T-Factor” will work as an international community of practice, delivering an innovative city-mentoring model which will create multiple collaborations between the pilot cities, advance cultural and creative hubs, universities, enterprises and social organisations partnering the project, so as to shape an international movement of capacity-building and knowledge co-creation for the transformative time in urban regeneration leveraging heritage, culture and creativity.

From pilot to pilot, activities and contents will change according to the thematic focus of the regeneration projects; nonetheless, all pilots will experiment with an overall scheme of meanwhile uses and activities that starts from wide access, participation and engagement and progressively narrows down the target-groups according to the local innovation missions. This scheme scaffolds three layers of activities:

– Prompt uses: ‘soft’ activities – events, workshops, festivals, fairs – that will entail a prompt use of the space, and whose main goal is to make the area well known by different actors in the city. The Local Coalitions will have to ensure that the programme of events is content-wide and accessible by different target-groups (ex. families, youth, senior citizens, children, etc.). Importantly, this layer shall be designed so as to run throughout the pilot development, as the basic layer of participation and engagement. In each pilot, we envisage at least 30 prompt events.

– Regular uses: activities with a regular/periodic use of the space, with key focus on capacity-building, training, incubation and acceleration programmes around the core themes addressed by each pilot. In each pilot, we envisage at least 2 incubation/acceleration programmes and 8 training activities.

– Permanent uses: activities that are settled ‘permanently’ in the area in the waiting time, such as, for example, artists residencies and studios, makerspaces, permanent exhibitions, urban gardens and more. In each pilot, we envisage at least 5 meanwhile uses.

In this project in Lithuania, regeneration plan foresees the creation of Kaunas Innovation Park in Aleksotas. This area which used to be a military base is being converted into industrial innovation area, building the physical infrastructures to fit the investors’ needs towards the creation of a vibrant hub where businesses and creative and cultural actors can settle and collaborate. In “T-Factor”, we want to explore the opportunity to push this regeneration towards the creation of an urban hub dedicated to restorative and regenerative business and cultural and creative practices rooted in the circular economy. Kaunas and Lithuania in general have a highly developed and growing IT sector, therefore developments are often related to IT and engineering sectors. The CCI and design sector is usually isolated from technology-intensive environments. In “T-Factor”, Kaunas Pilot will complement the infrastructural project of Kaunas Innovation Park in line with “Kaunas 2022” programme through actions aimed to: i) raise general awareness on the role of design, and CCI in the circular economy, favour the integration of CCI within the project, ii) build design capacity among innovators to create more effective, creative solutions for the circular economy, iii) support new regenerative business models that are valuable for people, give businesses a competitive advantage, and are regenerative. A number of cultural and design activities as well as the implementation of meanwhile uses – a ‘circular design hub’ – are foreseen. In relation to the innovation park project, various small-scale projects will take place such as regeneration of public spaces, parks, squares. A former boiler house will be converted into a community hub hosting a library, gym, event spaces, makerspaces. “T-Factor’s” full partners: City of Kaunas, Kaunas University of Technology, “Kaunas 2022”. Main initial stakeholders: Kaunas Regional Science and Technology Park, National Association of Cultural and Creative Industries, Association of Technical Spaces, Performative Design Association, Kaunas Cultural and Creative centre “Artkomas”, “DesignFriends” Community, Lithuanian Employment Service Agency.

The project funding will contribute with 93 875,00 Eur to the “Kaunas 2022” programme.

Creative Europe / European Outdoor Arts Academy: School of Participation

From 2019, “Kaunas 2022” together with the UK performance, public spaces and participatory art organisation “Walk the planks” and 4 partners and 4 associate partners implementing the European Academy of Outdoor Arts: a school of participation.

European Outdoor Arts Academy formed in 2016 when Creative Europe supported „School of Spectacle“. This project will both grow and sustain the Academy partnership to include 8 small- to medium-sized European Capitals of Culture or candidate cities and 2 small European cities in 9 countries. Together they will develop the capacity of their cultural sectors to deliver outdoor participatory arts experiences that in turn will grow their cultural audiences. They will do this by developing and delivering 5 bespoken “Schools of Participation” in 5 partner host cities (Plovdiv, Graz, Coventry, Novi Sad, Kaunas) between 2019 and 2020. Each school will provide 26 creative practitioners from the 10 Academy partner cities with 8 days of training into production in outdoor participatory arts. Here they will learn to co-create outdoor arts with up to 20 community participants from the host city. Together they will create a small-scale outdoor arts event that will be showcased in public space. All schools will be delivered by a team of outdoor arts experts drawn from across the core partnership. The programme will underpin the development of a professional network of European outdoor and participatory creative practitioners that strengthens their mobility, and career opportunities: Providing a practical opportunity to build capacity and create a programme of “action learning” for cultural organisations and practitioners in past, present and future European Capital of Culture, candidate cities, or cities with cultural strategies. Developing a pan-European model of audience engagement through the outdoor participatory arts practice. The learning will be shared across the ECoC network and beyond.

The project funding will contribute with 41 278,00 Eur to the “Kaunas 2022” programme.

The Nordic Council of Ministers secretariat / Urban Sports Culture (USC)

This project is meant to empower youth through sports and cultural activities with the necessary skills and knowledge to start their own initiatives, be active participants in society and promote equal access to sports and cultural activities. In 2022, Kaunas will become a European Capital of Culture, which gives many possibilities to put attention to the inclusion of youth using sports and culture as tools. Together with partners from the Nordic countries, “Kaunas 2022” team will seek to construct a program for youth in 2022, that would reflect the Nordic region vision – help spread the Nordic values. The NGO “Active youth” together with “Kaunas 2022” are willing to engage with the Nordic countries and manage the project together with the Nordic Council of Ministers office in Lithuania. Organisations will promote equality, mobility and visibility of young people in the region, spread practices from the Nordic region and promote core values of freedom of expression, equality, diversity and engagement. The link between urban sports and culture is our focus, how to use urban activities and include them in the Youth program of “Kaunas 2022”, strengthen understanding about the value of urban sports in the city life. Also, we will look for opportunities to use the experience from the Umeå 2014, the European Capital of Culture, i. e. its legacy in gender equality, accessibility, and diversity topics, that they stated as most successfully integrated themes during the Capital of Culture years.

The project aims to connect 3 countries and 4 organisations: Lithuania (organisations NGO “Active youth” and their partners “Kaunas 2022”, the European Capital of Culture), the Danish NGO “Game” and the Swedish NGO “Fryshuset”. Together they will seek to discover innovative and engaging ways to empower young people in urban areas with fewer opportunities. To be more exact: we aim to empower young people to be more active, help them start and develop their own cultural and sports initiatives that are inclusive, accessible and stimulate gender-equal culture (goals similar to the ones stated in the Nordic cultural co-operation policy for 2013-2020). This will be done through learning from good practices from each organisation, connecting young people through exchanges, organising open urban sports and cultural events and discussing topics of inclusion and equality.

The overall goal is using sports and culture as a tool for equal access, opportunities for disengaged youth to participate and as a vehicle for social cohesion and inclusion create a thriving urban sports community for youngsters in the partner cities of Denmark, Lithuania and Sweden, with special focus on Kaunas, as a European Capital of Culture in 2022.

The project funding will contribute with 16 152,00 Eur to the “Kaunas 2022” programme.

Creative Europe / Forgotten Masterpieces

Last year, “Kaunas 2022” has submitted a new application “Forgotten Masterpieces: A Network for Audience Development in Architecture through Digitisation” (FOMA) as a partner for EACEA (Creative Europe Support to European Cooperation Projects 2020) together with 3 main partner organisations: Atuul OÜ (Estonia), DOCOMOMO Germany, Association for the support and promotion of culture Contineo (Skopje) and 7 other associate partner organisations.

Duration of the project: 01/09/2020 – 30/04/2022.

The objective of the project is to develop and pilot test innovative approaches to audience development in the field of architecture via digital means. The project thus addresses the curious gap of audience development practices in the field of architecture as well as the disconnect between audience development and digitisation. The project will accomplish its objective by leveraging the potential of an integrated platform for communication on architecture through stakeholder cooperation, specifically with regard to the European Modernist architecture, at its outset a European “invention” and a symbol for the importance of cross-cultural links in the European architecture and builds on the legacy of the European Year of Cultural Legacy 2018 and create a lasting impact.

“Kaunas 2022” commitment in this project is to organise and hold one network event related to Kaunas modernism and its European context; together with the Architecture and Urbanism Research Centre of Kaunas University of Technology to develop the researches of history and heritage of Lithuanian architecture, especially Kaunas modernism; to storage and display the materials representing the heritage of Kaunas architecture and research thereof between WWI and WWII on the database www.autc.lt; to adapt the database www.autc.lt to specific digital tools in order to facilitate online collaboration; to develop heritage community of Kaunas and Kaunas District website www.modernizmasateiciai.lt (to write creative histories, to make video with the owners of the modernist buildings, to collect impressions, stories, testimonies and reactions); to disseminate good practices (especially successful restoration examples) and share them with the European partners.

The project funding will contribute with 51 000,00 Eur to the “Kaunas 2022” programme.

The European Climate Initiative / Greening Modernism Guidelines

In 2019, “Kaunas 2022” also applied as a partner for The European Climate Initiative (EUKI) together with 3 main partner organisations: Kaunas University of Technology, Institute of Architecture and Construction (Lithuania), (Detmolder Schule für Architektur und Innenarchitektur (Germany), Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania).

Duration of the project: 01/10/2020 – 31/12/2022.

The project “Greening Modernism Guidelines (GMG): mitigating climate change by biophilic design and lifestyle“ aims to rethink the current state of the post-war social housing neighbourhoods in terms of sustainable development and climate change involving the public. Today, some of these areas are in a state of social degradation. On the other hand, some of them are recognised as important historical testimonies of the second half of the 20th century. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of architects, natural scientists, and heritage specialists, the project will develop future scenarios based on principles of biophilic design and bottom-up approach. Outcomes of the project will combine awareness-raising and social engagement with the broader aim to influence indirectly the state strategies on cultural heritage. At least 3 different types of activities will be undertaken during this project aiming to implement this objective: workshops, training courses, summer schools in Kaunas (International Modernism Summer School). Among the objectives of the project is to establish a cooperation network between the applicant organisations.

The project funding will contribute with 68 678,00 Eur to the “Kaunas 2022” programme.