Impromptu at the City Hall: Call for action

15 April, 19:00 | Lisbon City Hall

Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe is at stake.

We are opening the Arts Festivals Summit in medias res, with a loud call for action to all arts festivals: Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe is at stake.

Festivals are powerful tools in creating people-to-people contact. The facts and figures of festivals' reach are impressive in terms of audience participation, reaching out to youths, social cohesion and sustainability.

Arts festivals are motors for artistic creation, production and mobility of work and people, within and beyond Europe.

The unique capacities festival makers have developed and their flexible organisation can exploit many new business models and help them succeed.

Festivals function in a complex creative environment, stimulating synergy and building bridges on many levels - from the artistic to the political.

The artistic, organisational and financial model of a festival, its cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorial set-up, allows direct investment into the artistic process that enriches Europe’s citizens.

We are a trusted alliance of festival makers. With more than 2000 festivals registered for the new interactive website FestivalFinder.eu, we demonstrate our commitment to bringing the arts to citizens every day. With more than 1450 festivals carrying Europe’s quality label stamp, we together celebrate our engagement in community involvement and international openness.

The general atmosphere in Europe is challenging. Many countries can benefit from our constructive messages and the connections they create: Eye-to-Eye. We as arts festivals have a strong place in the positive vision of the European Union.

Festivals and their allies call in Lisbon for the essential continuation of EFFE: Europe for Festivals – Festivals for Europe and its new Travelling Arts Fund and programme elements. We ask local national ministries and European institutions to invest in something we cannot achieve alone - building bridges, creating a reference point for programme mechanisms (including a catalyst fund for building trans-national capacity) where it can make a difference.

We ask in the decision making process for Creative Europe this year:

  1. to launch a call for 2020 within the current Creative Europe Programme so that the below festivals alliance can present its further development and
  2. a place and budget for continuity and development in the Creative Europe Programme 2021-2027. Without this decision, an entire sector and an incredibly powerful programme that proved its relevance will end.

We urge stakeholders to foresee this financial framework in order to use our strength and the success of the investment made to reinforce the European project from the past 5 over the next 7 years.

The initiator of this call are all the members of the European Festivals Association (EFA).