Re-Imagine Europe (2017-2021) was a four-year project involving ten cultural organisations from across Europe. With a programme of residencies, commissions, symposia, and workshops, the project partners stimulated both artistic production and audience development. They experimented with new ways of reaching out to their audiences, motivated by the ambition to develop a broader and more engaging approach to audience development.

The main aim of Re-Imagine Europe was to engage audiences through art with the social and political challenges that are decisive for Europe’s future, such as climate change, rising nationalism, and migration. Therefore, the project partners – Sonic Acts and Paradiso from Amsterdam, Elevate from Graz, Lighthouse from Brighton, INA GRM from Paris, Bergen Kunsthall from Bergen, KONTEJNER from Zagreb, A4 from Bratislava, Disruption Network Lab from Berlin, and Radio Web MACBA from Barcelona – commissioned new interdisciplinary and experimental works to address these issues and to engage audiences. Throughout the project, special attention was paid to how technological advances continue to change society, politics, and the ways we interact, and how new technologies urge us to explore new modes of acting and thinking. Re-Imagine Europe hoped to open up new spaces for new ideas, to propose alternatives to the status quo, and to stimulate and open up the critical imagination of both artists and audiences, with a view towards contributing to a more democratic and resilient European society. Rather than suggesting one coherent vision for the future, Re-Imagine Europe provided a platform to many, very different artistic voices and perspectives.

Over the past four years the project partners commissioned more than 100 works from diverse artists, makers, composers, and musicians from, or based in, Europe. They presented and distributed these works, so a wide audience was able to experience and engage with them. They organised more than 160 workshops, symposia, and lectures to involve audiences into the practice of making art and in discussions about how art can inform our ideas about society. The partners shared the knowledge they gained throughout the project, not only in workshops and lectures, but also in a great number of podcasts, as well as digital publications for a large audience, and in publications that aimed at improving and building the professional competencies and digital capacities of artists and other professionals working in art and culture. As a result, these four years of collaboration have now led to a sustainable network of organisations for the commissioning, production, presentation, and distribution of new interdisciplinary artworks.

This publication collects articles, interviews and reports that specifically reflect on the audience development and capacity building activities of the ten cultural organisations that participated in Re- Imagine Europe. Re-Imagine Europe developed tools for audience development which connect audiences with art that addresses current social and political challenges. It also enabled those working in the cultural field – from artists to communication staff – to improve their skills, and work on their professionalisation.

In this publication we have intentionally chosen to follow a practice- based approach: most of the texts explore audience development and capacity building from the vantage point of one or more projects that were part of Re-Imagine Europe.