Open Up is a four year cultural project (2020-2023) co-funded by the Creative Europe programme, promoting underrepresented artists and cultural workers. Open Up is a partnership between seven distinct organisations from seven cities across Europe. Through its collaborative activities, Open Up aims to establish and support sustainable art practises through the network, and provide participants with training and knowledge based activities and actions, including numerous laboratories, workshops, festivals, exhibitions and publications. Open Up aims to empower creators and artworkers to develop, present and sustain their practices and its contexts.

The consortium consists of the following cultural organisations and academic institutions: Pierides Foundation (Nicosia, Cyprus), PUBLICS (Helsinki, Finland), Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France), University of Thessaly (Volos, Greece), New Hand Lab (Covilhã, Portugal), Autonomous University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain) and Valand Academy of the Gothenburg University (Gothenburg, Sweden).

Through Open Up Helsinki, PUBLICS will map out, invite, and nurture new audiences for its activities through a durational public artwork commissioned by PUBLICS.

‘Parahosting’ is an ongoing and expanding strand where PUBLICS hosts, supports and takes care of small-scale independent non-profit initiatives and freelance cultural workers as the start of a longer conversation as to “What are we doing and what could we be doing differently?”. ‘Parahosting’ is a program of residencies, performances, talks, listening sessions, events, and productions, where PUBLICS looks after other projects by sharing its resources, its space and offering its full capacities for other’ activities. In this sense, ‘Parahosting’ is a useful term to realign and contest these binaries and to describe transitional temporal processes of engagement with people taking precedence over exhibitions or productions as the primary end product.

‘Future Futures’ is a long-term and location specific public art project with PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board; a new employment and education opportunity for 18-21 year olds based in Helsinki. This ongoing project seeks to engage in forms of collective learning through processes of knowledge exchange and co-curation between young people and invited participants in the local context. Future Futures (acknowledges the mutual importance of establishing space for intergenerational modes of exchange within the context of arts and culture, both for organisations and young people, to learn from one another and to imagine more accessible institutional models for the future. In Helsinki invited practitioners, including visiting artists and an online community radio, will host six skills sessions or ‘community learnings’ to work through different approaches of establishing these possibilities in immersive workshops inspired by the intersectional and social values of their practice.

‘Today is Our Tomorrow’, is an annual series of collaborations and co-commissions responding to our future present social conditions – a coming together of affinities, alliances and differences. The program is annually produced in partnership with other local and international organisations, initiatives and institutions. Today Is Our Tomorrow takes the form of a roving constellation of practices, discussions, talks, workshops, installations, interventions, film screenings, events, live performances and more. The festival presents in microcosm, alter-futures being enacted, lived and represented as current socio-cultural and artistic practices based in Finland and globally. The collaborative methodology and consultation aims to represent an ecology and diversity of thought and experience.

View:
→ Today Is Our Tomorrow 2019
→ Today Is Our Tomorrow: Online Film Program
→ Today Is Our Tomorrow 2021

Visit for more information:
→ openupeu.com