Creative Slovenia in 2019: a fascinating feat again

Culture.si | Editorial

Since 1997 hundreds of cultural organisations from across Europe join in for a very special set of administrative and discursive protocols. New projects are painstakingly compiled and proposed each year as artists and producers aim for co-funding from one of the European Union's cultural programmes. Today these programmes are united under the name Creative Europe.

Worth about a billion and a half euros and covering the period between 2014 and 2020, Creative Europe is – to put it briefly – an instrument to support the creation of a shared European cultural space and identity. It is divided into two subprogrammes, the film-focused MEDIA, and the more diverse CULTURE, further partitioned into Literary Translations, European Platforms, European Networks and Cooperation Projects. It is the latter one the Slovene cultural producers have consistently been excelling in with considerable panache. In 2019, 25 Slovene organizations are participating in the 28 supported Cooperation Projects of the Culture sub-programme.

20 years ● 0 organisations ● 0 projects

Show projects by: field public/private status role in the project

Organisations by status

Public
Private

Projects by field

film and audiovisual projects
interdisciplinary projects
multimedia and new technologies
books and reading / literary translation
cultural heritage
architecture, design and applied arts
performing arts (theatre, dance, music)
visual arts

Organisation's role in the project

beneficiary
co-beneficiary

EU funding illustrated

The infographic above is based on an interoperability project carried out by Culture.si and CED Slovenia. It features data that relates to EU funding for culture as a whole, encompassing the film and audiovisual media programmes (up until 2014 led under a separate entity known as MEDIA) as well as the two seven year schemes for culture (these were preceded by some smaller sector-related programmes from the late 1990s, for which Slovenia was not eligible yet).

Each square represents one participant organisation and clicking on them will take you to the more in-depth project descriptions. The infographic itself shows the distribution of projects by art field, by the organisation's role in the project and – interestingly – by the organisation's status as either a public or a private entity.

Note that the 2019 project line on this infographic is incomplete at the time of the writing of this article as we are in August 2019, when the film and audiovisual projects are not yet inscribed.

Natural born cultural managers?

When analysing the results of the previous years (2007–2011 and 2014–2015), Peter Inkei of the Budapest Observatory already stated in 2016 that "Slovenia is the incontestable east-central European champion in the Creative Europe programme". Thus his recent statement is merely a reiteration, as he wrote in May 2017, that "the champion is again Slovenia with a 35% success rate".

What he is referring to with the success rate in 2017 is that out of 20 projects with a Slovene "project leader" (the projects are comprised of one lead organisation and several partner ones), 7 managed to be successful in obtaining funds. The other 74 endorsed projects – chosen out of the 548 submitted applications – featured 10 Slovene organisation as partners (which, between us, can often be the preferable position in terms of the funds/responsibility trade-off). With all this in mind, Inkei rhetorically wonders if Slovenes are "born cultural managers". They might be, but more probably it is the complex historic composition of the Slovene cultural landscape (especially the NGO scene) that should offer interesting clues in this regard.

Motovila Institute / Creative Europe Desk Slovenia event Uspešno ... Ustvarjalno (Successful ... Creative), hosting Slovenian producers involved in the Creative Europe funding scheme, 2018.

Input of the Creative Europe Desk Slovenia (Motovila Institute)

There is, however, one factor that seems to stand out as rather important – the Creative Europe Desk Slovenia. This is the national information office for such matters, led by the small, but dedicated and trusted, NGO Motovila Institute. Recently, its crew, in a telling phrase that further elaborates Inkei's remark, has been labelled by one of the grant-winning producers as "our mothers".

Be that as it may, helping out the applicants with advice, conducting informative workshops and carrying out other matters of general support, Motovila team sports a systematic approach towards producing a community-based pool of skills, tricks, contacts, and the like.

Anyway, the year 2018 as well as 2019 have brought excellent results again.

Recent Culture Cooperation Project recipients

The chosen propositions from Slovenia are of course very diverse. One would be hard pressed to find a common theme even as the wordings of project descriptions tend to be somewhat generic, their authors striving to align them with the supposed affinities of Brussels.

The composition of successful organisations is similarly miscellaneous, ranging from small organisations to big and venerated art producers. While 6 of the participating organisations haven't had any prior experience in EU's cultural programmes, the 14 of them are veterans with at least one project under their belts. If in 2017 the public institutions have significantly boosted their Creative Europe profile, and have almost caught up with the previously much more industrious NGO sector, also in 2018 out of 18 organisations there are 8 successful public institutions.

In 2019, the number of successful public institutions (13) is even a bit higer than the number of NGO organisations (12). The 3 producers that got the grant as lead organisations are involved as partners in another granted Cooperation Projects. The producers located in Ljubljana, Maribor, Nova Gorica, Novo mesto and Murska Sobota collaborate mostly with partners from Italy (15), Germany (12), Belgium (11), UK (11), and Poland (10).

Online version (printscreen) of interactive EU funding infographic, featuring successful producers with public or private status, recipients of EU Funding 2000-2019 (Culture and Media). Data have been collected by Motovila Institute that operates the Creative Europe Desk Slovenia