Mapping of Initiatives on Culture, Health and Well-being

Arts on Prescription (AoP) in the Baltic Sea Region 2023-2025 is an Interreg Baltic Sea Region project co-funded by the European Union.
The project’s partners are jointly developing a generic AoP programme concept, based on existing evidence and best practice, and adapting it to local conditions in partnering countries – Denmark, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Sweden. The programme will be piloted by local and regional public authorities in cooperation with cultural institutions and evaluated for its health effects, organisational set-up and economic benefits.
Additionally, the project partners are developing an online Arts on Prescription Practitioner’s Guide, which will aid and support public authorities, cultural and health institutions engage people with mental health challenges in social and non-therapy art activities to improve their mental wellbeing.
In the final phase of the project the AoP concept programme will be transferred to other cities and regions who will also have access to and support of the online practitioner’s guide and a rent-an-expert programme. Furthermore, the project partners will initiate a dialogue with national authorities and health insurance funds in order to improve the structural support and financing options for AoP in the long-term.

The Podlaskie Museum in Białystok is the owner of the palace and park complex in Choroszcz, which includes a palace with the Museum of Palace Interiors and a park from the 18th century. The museum and park are an ideal place combining culture, art, health, a healthy lifestyle and well-being. The park requires a lot of investment to fully benefit from its advantages. The Podlasie Museum in Białystok systematically takes steps to make it as fully accessible as possible to residents, tourists and guests. The park is used for therapy by patients of the nearby psychiatric hospital.

“Museotherapy” is an annual conference held by a group of scientists, practitioners - public that is fascinated with sociotherapeutic and psychotherapeutic working methods applied in museums. During the two-day meeting, we are examining the relations of educational programs beneficiaries and employees from various cultural heritage institutions.
Museotherapy is also a set of education activities. We working in groups (schools and individual peple) with stres, problems with wellbeing, cancer, emocional issues.
We want make diffrence in peple lifes and show that museum can be "safe space" when everyone can feel good and with the help of art can change thinking perspective of life.

This pilot project consists of prescribing guided visits to museums from health centres. It is aimed at elderly people who suffer from unsought loneliness, social isolation or physical inactivity in the city of Valencia. The main objective is "to improve the health of the participants by combating a sedentary lifestyle and strengthening their self-esteem." Six museums or cultural spaces and six health centres of Valencia have participated in this pilot project by offering two guided tours for each group. Once the pilot project is over and after a final evaluation, the project scope will be broaden to the entire region of Valencia (Comunitat Valenciana).

The Museo Nacional de Escultura aims to ensure the sustainable development of its Art and Health Program namend Museum for all by fostering long-term collaborations with various entities. This will be achieved through formal agreements, allowing regular, programmatic activities with clear and measurable objectives.
- Guided tours for the Association for Active Coping of Pain with the aim to stimulate new fields of interest that help to face chronic pain with a life rich in social and cultural incentives.
- Activities with Personas Foundation for the improvement of the quality of life of people with intellectual disabilities; making them visible in cultural institutions; includeing them in culture and giving value to their creativity and empowering their own expresión.
- Therapy tours and activities with homeless people and Art and Transformation Workshops with people with mental illness, both projects in collaboration Intras Foundation.
- Guided Tours for the Red Cross Elderly Program with the intention of contributing to an active old age and fighting against loneliness.
- Pediatric Classrooms public hospitals in Valladolid (This program ran successfully pre-pandemic and it Will be relaunched in September 2024 alongside new initiatives with their hospital partners).
- Mindfulness Mysteria Workshop by Amelia Melo. Meditation through different techniques of mindfulness and contemplation of art that aims to favor an approach to the meditative state.
- Thematic tour: Health in the Europe of the past for individual audiences connecting the idea of health, hygiene, and death in past European societies. It seeks identification with individuals from the past and common concerns. It favors the critical spirit and active participation of visitors.

On the occasion of the centenary of the artist's death, Culture in Vein Foundation presents ¿Sorolla in a hospital? within Arte Ambulatorio, a program of itinerant exhibitions in vulnerable spaces, bringing art to places where it is not usually accessible: hospitals and rural communities at risk of depopulation, with content specially curated for these audiences.
This exhibition proposes to open a space for reflection through a contemporary and poetic look at the works of the Valencian painter. These are grouped into four blocks: intuition, sensation, thought and feeling—categories of our psyche according to psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung—, as emotional landscapes through which the visitor walks. A journey so that viewers can go through their memories, emotions and experiences through Sorolla's canvases, which so appeal to our senses, to moments of our own individual biography and collective identity.

The declaration as a representative manifestation of intangible cultural heritage is a legal instrument of protection that safeguards the development of these cultural expressions that represent a very important factor of social cohesion for the communities where they are developed. These cultural expressions promote social well-being because they foster the feeling of belonging to a community, the transmission of knowledge and social interaction between people of different genders, ages, etc.
Some examples:
‘The musical societies of the Valencian Community’ (2021) make up an extraordinary associative phenomenon present in the territory of the Valencian Community and constitute a fundamental tool for coexistence between the different strata of society, generating at the same time spaces for intergenerational relationships. In this sense, the Musical Society is an identifying and structuring element of the Valencian territory and culture, preserving and disseminating its traditional musical repertoire and acting as an agent and cultural dynamiser, guaranteeing its access to the rural areas with the lowest population density. The protection of this heritage can have transformative effects on the territory, dynamising cultural policies and offering access to culture and an element of local, educational and artistic development to its inhabitants.
‘Traditional guitar playing in the framework of participatory festivals’ as a Representative Manifestation of Intangible Cultural Heritage is justified, in addition to its intrinsic musical value, by the existence of a way of understanding the festival with the guitar as a sustaining element and for participating in the maintenance of indigenous repertoires that are characteristic of certain populations or regions and that contain values from the point of view of identity, as they symbolise belonging to a community and the claim of a culture of their own. It is a manifestation linked to rural cultures and their communal modes of expression, and its presence is still alive in many regions of Spain.

TGR The Green Room (TGR) is a non-profit social enterprise founded in October 2020 in Cologne, Germany, for the artists (especially musicians, dancers, theater professionals). With offerings from the areas of performance research, somatic training, psychological and professional counseling, and artistic performance coaching, TGR offers performing artists individually-tailored support systems. TGR's offer combines health promotion with formats to strengthen artistic practice with a focus on process-oriented self-exploration. Since founding in 2020, The Green Room has assisted over 200 artists, and held over 60 performances showcasing our resident artists for an collective audience of c. 2000 audience members.
Since 2022, TGR has been offering various types of residencies, initially for artists fleeing the war in Ukraine and now to a broader spectrum of international artists. TGR has been selected for a patronage by the German Commission for UNESCO, and has partnered with several organizations such as the Goethe Institut, Artists-at-Risk (Finland), the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.
The Green Room has presented lectures and talks to such organizations as the Gürzenich Orchestra, the European Network of Cultural Centers, and the Performing Arts Medical Association, making the case for increased awareness of artists’ mental and physical health for career longevity and creative self-actualization. TGR The Green Room is a member of the European Network of Cultural Centers, IETM, and On The Move.

A multidisciplinary center dedicated to art-based therapy and to a specialized medical approach of artists health.
- Arts Medicine consultations
- Arts Medicine treatments, preventive programs and health promotion
- Concerts for patients and healthcare professionals

In Parkinson's, motor activity, sociality and the possibility of taking care of one's emotions play a fundamental role in improving the course of the disease. Dance therapy fits perfectly into an integrated rehabilitation approach, as it offers delicate stimulation on both a motor and emotional level in a pathology characterized precisely by disorders that involve these two spheres. It involves functional, cognitive and psychological aspects to bring them towards mutual support, contributing to greater psychophysical well-being.
The courses are dedicated to those who experience the disease firsthand, but also to family members and operators: not companions, but actual recipients of the intervention, with a view to sharing health as intended by the World Health Organization: state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not simply the absence of disease.