Location: Cultural Centre Valve - Valvesali Hall
Address: Hallituskatu 7, 90100 Oulu, Finland | Venue Information | Event Map 

Captions are available for this session

As political pressure grows and funding landscapes become increasingly precarious, cross-border collaboration in the performing arts is facing new constraints. This session will explore current trends in EU cultural policy - including Culture Compass, AgoraEU and Global Europe - alongside developments at national and local levels. We will draw on two recent reports by the Performing Arts Coalition (PAC) on cultural rights and artistic freedom and on funding for cross-border cultural collaboration, both based on surveys conducted across PAC member organisations in 2026.

Following a short input on cultural policy trends and Q&A, participants will join table discussions to examine three interconnected trends shaping the sector: the shrinking value of arts in political agendas, funding cuts and growing political pressure. Together, we will reflect on what this means for us - from instrumentalisation to blatant censorship and competition for short-term grants. Most importantly we will collectively search for the most effective strategies for the performing arts sector to overcome these trends. 

This session is for everyone concerned about the current policy context and the state of funding ecosystems. We want to explore the key concerns together, but above all to develop collective strategies to address them. Bring your good practices and stories (if you have them) and a solution-oriented mindset.

Facilitator:

Ása Richardsdóttir, IETM, Belgium

Speaker:

Elena Polivtseva, Independent Researcher, Belgium

Resources:

Between Rhetoric and Reality: Cultural Rights, Artistic Freedom, and Democratic Resilience, by Elena Polivtseva
EU International Cultural Collaborations, IETM Policy Paper