TRANSEUROPE: A NEW EUROPEAN FORUM FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE VISUAL ARTS
This programme fosters exchange between European photography and visual arts professionals.
The Fundación Contemporánea (Spain), The Finnish Museum of Photography (Finland) and Euromare (Greece) are the three organising partners of this initiative aimed at promoting opportunities for professionals in the fields of photography and the visual arts.
The programme, which will continue until 2019, will include activities such as workshops, portfolio reviews, professional activities, group exhibitions and a magazine, all of which are to encourage exchange between professionals, experts and institutions, and the international mobility and visibility of artists.
Transeurope is an initiative made possible thanks to the support of the Creative Europe programme.
The project will have its own platform, the website www.transeuropephoto.eu, a virtual meeting point where professionals can show their work. The website will also host a database of European visual artists, institutions and experts.
Beginning this fall, the European photography and visual arts industry will have a new forum that will promote opportunities among professionals and facilitate the creation of international collaboration networks. Through photography workshops, professional activities, portfolio reviews, group exhibitions and the publication of a magazine, Transeurope is an initiative designed to encourage exchange, mobility and visibility for artists in Scandinavia, the eastern and western Mediterranean and the Balkans. This project is made possible thanks to the support of the European Union, through its Creative Europe programme.
Transeurope has a dual identity, as a transnational project that fosters the international mobility of professionals, and as a training project, through activities that improve the skills and technical and artistic knowledge of photographers.
Transeurope is committed to disseminating awareness of photography in its various aspects and to promoting work that originates in the countries of the European Union. In addition, this programme aspires to become a forum of exchange for specialised centres and experts in the visual arts and photography.
In so doing, Transeurope will become a platform that brings visibility to European photography in all of its dimensions, including creation, exhibition, curating and training.
As a network, it will help artists internationalise their work, in order to increase their professional opportunities beyond their countries of origin, while providing training activities, and become a linking platform for international experts and important institutions such as the Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki), the Museum of Latvian Photography (Riga), the Museu Coleção Berardo (Portugal), the Centrum för fotografi (Stockholm) and the Fondazione Forma per la fotografia (Milan), among others.
In order to create this network, Transeurope will have a digital platform. The website www.transeuropephoto.eu will be a virtual container that includes a database, accessible to any interested party, institution, artist or expert, to foster synergies within the framework of the European Union.
Development of the project
Transeurope’s primary aim is to become a platform through which professionals and photographers can learn, interact and further their work internationally. To that end, the project will have four phases, made up of workshops, portfolio reviews, travelling group exhibitions and the publication of an official magazine.
In its first phase, Transeurope will organise 14 workshops in 14 countries, open to 224 photographers, in which a variety of professionals in the field of photography will provide participants with the tools that are needed to put together a good portfolio and enable them to show the best of their work. These workshops will be held in Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Cyprus.
The second phase will include portfolio review sessions in the three cities of the organising partners: Athens, Helsinki and Madrid. In these sessions, 63 professionals, including directors of museums and cultural institutions, curators, gallerists, directors of festivals and publishers will meet with a total of 210 photographers selected from the projects presented in the three portfolio reviews. The call to participate in the portfolio reviews will be announced next November. The selected portfolios will be made available for viewing on the www.transeuropephoto.eu website and reflect the latest trends in European photography.
Three curators will choose 30 projects from among those selected for the portfolio reviews to be included in group exhibitions that will be shown in Madrid, Helsinki and Athens.
To accompany these travelling exhibitions, Transeurope will publish its own official magazine, which will offer a complete analysis of the 30 selected works.
Organisers
Transeurope is organised by three European institutions with longstanding experience in the international promotion of photography and the visual arts: the Fundación Contemporánea (Spain), The Finnish Museum of Photography (Finland) and Euromare (Greece).
The Fundación Contemporánea is the entity in charge of organising PHotoESPAÑA. Over its thirty-year history, the festival has consolidated its international position in the dissemination of photography and the visual arts. Its Discovery programme, which has been held ever since the festival’s first edition, places emerging photographers in contact with curators and professionals in the field of photography, who evaluate their work in portfolio review sessions, and is an example of this festival’s efforts to create professional networks. Likewise, since 2009 PHotoESPAÑA, in collaboration with the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), provides a space for the most innovative initiatives from Latin America, Africa and Asia through the Transatlantic programme.
The Finnish Museum of Photography is a Finnish museum devoted to photography and to promoting photography and Finnish culture. The museum hosts exhibitions of Finnish and foreign artists, offering a complete panorama of international photography. The museum has a collection of 3.7 million images, and boasts a comprehensive collection of contemporary Finnish photography. In 2009, the museum began to hold professional activities, including portfolio reviews in which Finnish photographers can show their work to international experts.
Euromare is a non-profit organisation that was founded in Athens in1994. From its beginnings, its main objective has been to organise specialised international events, conferences and exhibitions that deal with cultural, educational and environmental issues. Since 2013, Euromare has organised the Athens International Contemporary Art Festival, one of the most important events of the European art calendar. It has recently formed a department that specialises in photography, made up of experts, and for the purposes of creating a Photography Forum where artists, curators and conservation specialists meet in the fall for workshops, exhibitions and conferences.
For more information here or contact Mrs Georgia Gini athens@transeuropephoto.eu