Mapping of Initiatives on Culture, Health and Well-being

The Firefly project aims to create friendly hospital environment, preserving the social integration of hospitalized children by painting the hospital rooms of child clinics in a numbers of hospitals in rural areas. The project envisions pedagogues and psychologists, artists, students of various specialties and volunteers who work with children that will break the hospital rhythm while also offering seminars with psychologists for doctors in order to help them cope with stress.

Through the project Art and Survival, Connecting Cultures has faced the complex and delicate problem of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) – an illness which takes a particularly heavy toll in post conflict countries, particularly devastating for the possibilities of reconstruction of an everyday normality within those societies – applying the language of art in an empathic approach on several levels in order to combat the stigma relating to mental health and the widespread anxieties deriving from the social and psychological consequences of widespread violence. Focusing attention on Bosnia-Herzegovina twelve years after the end of the conflict, Connecting Cultures invited the artist Cesare Pietroiusti to conduct a workshop working with three of the most promising Bosnian artists (Sandra Dukic, Arman Kulasic, Lala Rascic) and with the patients of two Mental Health Centres in Mostar. The long preparatory phase due to the complexities of creating a dialogue with and between the local institutions and the creation of a network of organisations has been an important part of the process. All the phases of the project, with special attention to the workshop experience, have been filmed by a team of professional filmmakers of the Centre for Contemporary Art of Sarajevo and a documentary on PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) was produced. The whole project has been introduced by Connecting Cultures in a study day dedicated to the theme of the Human Rights, Art and Survival | Focus on Bosnia-Herzegovina, presented at Triennale Bovisa, together with video materials of the project.

Zagreb Mental Fest is a scientific and artistic event that promotes modern methods and approaches to mental health. This is the first such event in Zagreb aimed at creating a foundation for an annual event that will promote inclusive programs of intersectoral interdisciplinary cooperation between art, philosophy and mental health. The two-day festival of culture and mental health will bring together various experts and artists from the fields of psychiatry, psychology, fine arts, sculpture, acting, literature and music.

Over the course of three years (2014 - 2017) one a week, Panic Button Theatre, represented by Vasilena Radeva and Bogdana Kotareva lead a theatre class with patients of the City Psychiatric Clinic, in Sofia, Bulgaria. The participants also attended a performance at Theatre Sofia once a month. The creative meetings between the artists and patients lead to the culmination of a sharing, for an invited audience, of three Bulgarian texts: Don’t Loose Heart, by St. Stratiev; Tourists, by Chudomir; and Antonio and Claudia, by Georgi Angelov. The theatrical meetings were filmed and made into a documentary film called - One Hour Theatre, written and directed by Petia Ivanova.

Those are medical clowns who rise the spirit of hospitalized children, their parents and medical team.The clowns do not perform in common rooms, but visit each patient, assist in medical interventions such as blood sampling, thread removal, ultrasound, etc. Thus, they show additional support not only to the emotional status of the children, but also to their parents and medical staff. The presence of clowns in these situations reduces patients' anxiety and helps doctors do their job more easily.

At the beginning of the summer of 2021 a programme called “The Art of Staying Healthy” was launched. The programme is led by a joint project team, representing the Northern Dimension Partnership on Culture (NDPC), EUNIC Global and The Northern Dimension Partnership in Public Health and Social Well-being (NDPHS), supported by the Arts Promotion Centre from Finland. The aim is to empower collaboration between the arts and health sectors and to pilot arts interventions in the health and well-being of people and communities in the Northern Dimension area.
During the open call were received 56 eligible applications and unique project ideas from ten countries on how arts can foster the well-being of people in. In order to participate in the open call, the applicants had to prove their existing or committed collaboration with partner(s) from another sector, as well as the level of necessity and sustainability of the project idea. With the help of a selection committee of five experts, 11 projects from seven countries were selected. It is worth noting that shortly after the evaluation process, the project team was so impressed by the quality and relevancy of the project ideas, that the available funding was more than doubled from EUR 45,000 up to nearly EUR 110,000. This provides the opportunity for twice as many projects to be piloted than originally planned at the start of the programme.
The selected projects involve different target groups such as hearing-impaired persons, adults and healthcare professionals with mental disorder, cancer patients, pupils, homeless people and others. On the one hand, each project will use its own methodology to demonstrate the impact on the target group, like dance, storytelling, photography, forum theatre etc. On the other, it will try to measure the impact on the health and well-being of the target group with measurable indicators.
In the programme “The Art of Staying Healthy”, participants receive funding for pilot projects, the opportunity to participate in knowledge-based workshops, mentoring support and onsite visits. The duration of the programme is till the end of 2022. The participants will receive support to establish a community and a peer-to-peer network that will remain in place and function after the programme ends.
In addition to the programme, it is planned to prepare a toolkit that will further help other organizations to build cross-sectoral partnerships. Two independent experts Ms Inga Surgunte and Ms Diana Walters will follow and analyse the process of the project and sum up the main conclusions in the form of a toolkit. Thus the team aims to offer the lessons learned from the pilot projects to those working in the field.
The Art of Staying Healthy programme is a part of the joint project between NDPC and EUNIC “Support to the NDPC”, co-funded by the European Commission. #NDcrossCreate

The KUFER theater company is the initiator of the project "Mental health as a creative process: drama workshops with young people" in cooperation with partners SPID , BoliMe and KunstTeatr! The program of drama workshops lasts one year through five separate cycles, with five different playwrights, a psychologist, a director and professional actors. It is dedicated for young people aged 18 to 25, workshops are free. Workshops are held only online, twice a week in the evening. Each workshop lasts two months, and within this two-month cycle each student is instructed in the creative process of playwriting, provided with the tools for creating a playwright and learn how to transfer their own doubts, thoughts and emotions to paper and turn them into a stage situation or a new playwriting. The focus of the workshop will be on drama writing exercises and template analysis. In addition to drama workshops, participants had the opportunity to participate in three participatory forums "TALK x mzkp.hr" which led by experts in the field of mental health of young people.

The Cultural Bazaar is the largest national interdepartmental project in the field of cultural and artistic education. The initiators and organizers of the project are the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport and the National Education Institute of the Republic of Slovenia. The executive producer is Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana. The project is created in collaboration with more than three hundred professional cultural institutions and artists from all fields of culture. Every year the project is joined by partners from other departments, in 2021 the partners were the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food and the Ministry of Health. Cultural Bazaar is providing each year another program, oriented to the main objectives of the organizers.
The program of the largest professional training in the field of cultural and artistic education Cultural Bazaar 2022 includes more than forty events: performances, film screenings, presentations, lectures, round tables, workshops and guided tours of the exhibition, dedicated to professionals and students from different areas (education, culture, agriculture and nutrition, health, social, environment and space ). The central theme was Culture and Arts / Well-being * of society and the individual emphasizing what is well-being, how it is defined it in the field of culture and art, what is the role of culture and art in building the community and individual well-being, where is the place of culture and art in the concept of well-being in various fields (health, social, space, environment), how culture and art contribute to the quality of living in urban environments and how in rural areas.

The Art Therapy project by Create.Act.Enjoy is a long term initiative, which started in 2012, and implies socio-cultural interventions carried out in 6 hospitals in Cluj-Napoca and Zalau, Romania. The project aims at improving the physical, mental and emotional health of people from hospitals. The recurrent project implies itinerant artistic moments and art therapy workshops carried out with the help of professional actors. Alongside artistic interventions based on improvisation and creativity, they organized 4 live music concerts in the hospital courtyards and photo exhibitions in hospital spaces. During the years, the project developed, enlarging their networks of hospitals from 1 to 6, diversifying the type of artistic means used in delivering the initiatives created especially for patients and the medical staff of the hospitals included in their network.

The "Street as an Opportunity" project aims to reduce the phenomenon of isolation and social exclusion that deprives children from vulnerable groups of access to cultural practices and consumption, by involving them in street social art workshops, non-formal education and social circus. The beneficiaries of the project will be 44 children aged between 4 and 16 years, coming from 32 families, who benefit of the services offered by the Parada Foundation.
The involvement of children in artistic workshops and social circus for a period of 6 months, between September 2021 and March 2022, aims to provide a secure and psychologically safe space for learning and self-improvement through play and start a process of resocialization, carried out under the rule of play and art accessible to all.