In the Winter of 2024 the one thing we call for is peace and understanding. In this edition of Eye-to-Eye, five women and one man from different parts of the world share with us the ideas that drive their thoughts about the role of arts and culture in our communities and societies.

Also this year, we’ll keep on sharing voices and acknowledging the need for our task to contribute to reciprocal understanding. We will reiterate our call for decisions and actions that can truly make a difference.

• Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya - Losing democracy is easy
• Khalid Tamer - African Capitals of Culture: Celebrating uniqueness and diversity
• Naomi Taylor - What’s the Score? The role of the team in the festival community
• Deborah de Robertis - Paying the price for a feminist and subversive career
• Thorunn Sigurdardottir - New National Opera in Iceland
• Catarine Lucas - Samba takes Lisbon

Artificial intelligence, nature and arts, the individual versus the collective, arts in rural areas and artistic curation of festivals: All the articles in this issue relate in some way to reflections about change, whether at a personal or societal level.

Eye-to-Eye zooms into the perspective and minds of six individuals who ask themselves in one or another way how the arts and their place in society makes sense to them.

• Zane Estere Gruntmane - Inhabiting a sense of change
• Ada Mușat - From Survival Kits to Post - Apocalyptic Dreams
• Drew Hemment - The New Real
• Esto Association - A collective of collectives
• Rusanda Curcă - Public-civic partnership for open cultural spaces
• Robyn Archer - Curating Festivals
  

227 people bound together by their work and love for the arts, for festivals and for connections between people and ideas from around the world for 5 days. Some of those who contributed actively to the Arts Festivals Summit Peralada/Girona 2023 are featured in this Eye-to-Eye Magazine. You’ll see, it’s a mixture of diverse thoughts that connect, whether they are central or peripheral to mainstream debate, that you’ll enjoy reading.

• Zvonimir Dobrović - Resisting temptations
• Chris Baldwin - Festivals are the decentralised and irreplaceable spaces for imagining the unimaginable. If they did not exist, we would have to re-invent them
• Kateryna Lozenko - Joining Hands and Hearts: Notes from Ukraine at the beginning of a long Journey
• Jordi Albareda - On the growing need to think
• Chris Salter - Theatre meets Extended Reality to question Climate Change
• Horacio Pérez - Creating “nets” instead of “networks”

This Eye-to-Eye magazine catches some of the perspectives shared in Yerevan, and speaks about new beginnings.

EFA’s 70th anniversary Arts Festivals Summit in Yerevan in 2022 brought together thinkers that know more about the new relationships between the arts and cities, the business and activism.

• Eric Corijn - Arts and cities: What is an Urban Festival?
• Ragni Stoltenberg - The magic of meetings – creating common ground across borders
• Dominika Lasota - Arts and activism: The urgency of our times
• Danica Purg - Arts and business: Common features to discover
• Simon Mundy - First Festival Anniversary
• Shahidul Alam - Boxing Day Blues

This edition shows how EFA has been a platform for dialogue since its inception; a place to meet, to listen, and to speak about the responsibility and possibilities of art and culture. EFA wants to facilitate conversations that have the constructive energy to create an effective intellectual and artistic capacity to look at the world’s challenges in a nuanced way: the Eye-to-Eye Magazine is a contribution to this endevour.

• Laura Nsengiyumva - The day when I (almost) melted (your father) - The challenges of the Working Group on Decolonisation
• Maxim Shalygin - Whispers from nowhere
• Haris Pašović - To Dream Or Not To Dream?
• Alexandra Dementieva - New technology used in art is just a tool but very powerful
• Yusuf Mahmoud - Festivals and contemporary discourses - How do festivals respond, embrace, react against contemporary themes?
• Frans de Ruiter - My first day…
  

We are in visionary company in this winter edition of our Eye-to-Eye magazine: 6 powerful women and gentlemen are pointing at pertinent issues of the arts and of festival life from the outside: as artists, as scientists, as politicians.

We are ready: Let’s make the best from the new year all together.

• Amanda Lind - Lessons from a recent experience of being Minister of Culture
• Els Dietvorst - This is what you came for. Art as a meeting place for connection, desire, exchange and transformation.
• Bartosz Szydłowski - The cultural revolution is underway
• Sergey Smbatyan - Classical music in Armenia
• Gundega Laiviņa - Attention as a form of ethics
• Ana Carla Fonseca - Territory-brand Jequitinhonha Valley – increasing the perceived value of a development process from the grassroots
  

This edition of the e-magazine bears witness to serious work done: from reflections on Schubert’s work to festivals’ role in society, philanthropists’ responsibilities and finally the importance of bringing a range of narratives from different parts of the world to audiences.

Dive into their prose. Enjoy their insights.

• Colm Croffy - The Gaelic Festival Odyssey
• Sofia Djama - The 3 Women from Kabul - From Kabul to Algiers, the fantasy of the West
  
• Oriol Aguilà - Culture and Arts post pandemia - It is time for philanthropy
• Meet Zsuzsanna Szálka, a Hungarian international cultural manager
• Michel Dalberto - Schubert, an appreciation
• Nele Hertling - The role of festivals and artists
  

The third edition of Eye-to-Eye, The Festival Quarterly, is giving a voice only to artists: artists and their view and vision of the moment, the challenges they are dealing with, and the very individual story they share with us.

We wish you a nice read and a blossoming Spring full of cultural and artistic activities.

• Kristina Borg - An entry from my {non-existent} daily journal - #TakeTwo
• Jo Strømgren - Eternally owned is but what’s lost!
• Sukina Pilgrim - The Potential in The Great Pause
• Jorge Andrade & José Capela - Selling our souls to the devil
• Ada Mukhina - Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future
• Frans de Ruiter - The Dutch National Campaign for the Arts: Kunsten’92

We start this decade with the second edition of Eye-to-Eye, The Festival Quarterly. This Winter issue of Eye-to-Eye presents 7 texts of authors sharing their thoughts about their cities, countries and the world, about ethics and aesthetics... but especially about the role that art and culture play in our societies. All are convinced that access to culture is a fundamental right and advocate for more cross-sectoral collaboration to integrate the arts in various sectors such as health, urban planning, etc. 

May Eye-to-Eye carry on their voices and resonate with them over the 10 next years.

• Jonathan Mills - Reimagining vibrant cities
• Ana Maria Rossi - A Postcard from Belgrade
• Robert Piaskowski - Voice from Krakow
• Romeo Castellucci - Laudation for Frie Leysen 
  + Frie Leysen (1950-2020) - Acceptance Speech at the award ceremony of the Erasmus Prize 2014
• Natalie Hennedige - How do you solve a problem like a very complex protagonist?
• Mahir Namur - Global Challenges, Cultural Visions

The Summer edition Eye-to-Eye, The Festival Quarterly offers you a good read of 6 authors who dig into one or another story, perspective, phenomenon or reflection related to our times we are living. 

Enjoy the read, and the end of a special festival Summer 2020!

• Aleš Šteger - Mirror reflections in an apartment window theatre 
• Ayoko Mensah - Afropolitan festivals: a challenge
• Alicja Gescinska - On Music, Morality and Krzysztof Penderecki
• Tomáš Sedláček - Advantages of disadvantages, or don’t let the quarantine slip through your fingers
• Melanie Burge - The pandemic’s immediate impact on performing arts in Australia
• Simon Mundy - Mediterranean Blues