Our Chairman and co-founder Ignasi Guardans will participate to a symposium organised by Public Policy Exchange on “Modernising Cultural and Creative Industries within the EU: Discussing the New European Agenda for Culture” on February 6, 2019. The conference, hosted by Thon Hotel Brussels City Centre, Brussels, will evaluate recent initiatives and policy developments in the field of Cultural and Creative Industries from the EU to tackle the emerging challenges to the sector. Together with the others key speakers, Dr Guardans will exchange views, perspectives and good practices on the possible strategies to tackle these challenges, and will debate the role of CCIs in national politics, education, international communication and social inclusion. The symposium will be structured in three main areas:

1. Analysing the European legislative framework: How to optimise available funding and ensure a comprehensive international cultural representation.
2. Strengthening the Cultural and Creative Sectors Across the Member States: How to reduce the market fragmentation, secure working conditions for culture professionals and sharing good practices in national and local levels.
3. Modernising and Innovating Cultural and Creative Sectors in a Digital Era: Discussing the changes in author rights management and reinforcing technological and business skills needed in CCI sectors.

Each session will be followed by a round of discussions, in which delegates will have the chance to rethink the subject by providing different viewpoints and ideas.
The symposium is addressed to all the creative and cultural players, from publisher and broadcaster associations to project managers.
If you are interested, you can register your place here.

–Event Brochure

Together with the team behind the project “SouthMed WiA, Towards Greater Gender Equality: Promoting the Role and Image of Women in the Southern Mediterranean Audiovisual Sector”, CUMEDIAE has carried out an extensive research and published an unprecedented handbook under the title “Gender-related Opportunities in the Audiovisual Sector”.

The new publication fills an important gap in the existing publications available to film professionals. For the first time ever, in Arabic and in English, a book puts together relevant information about gender equality opportunities in the audiovisual sector in the South Mediterranean, in different areas such as production, funding, exchange and networking, knowledge building and selected public initiatives.

It has been conceived to be a useful tool for any individual or organization involved or willing to get involved into activities promoting the gender balance and gender awareness effort. The research combines information about best practices which may trigger the establishment of synergies and networking opportunities, together with information on film industry institutions and opportunities with a direct or indirect link to gender which may be of benefit to film professionals in the the South Mediterranean countries and beyond.

The handbook can be consulted on the official website of SouthMed WiA. 

SouthMed WiA, co-funded by the European Union, addresses issues related to the perpetuation of gender-based stereotypes and the under-representation of women in the audio-visual sector in seven Southern Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia. It is implemented by a consortium led by Interarts, Spain, in partnership with the Higher School of Audio-visual and Cinema (ESAC) in Tunisia, the Culture and Media Agency Europe (CUMEDIAE) in Belgium, the Permanent Conference of the Mediterranean Audio-visual Operators (COPEAM) in Italy and the Screen Institute Beirut (SIB) in Lebanon.

Culture and Media Agency Europe (CUMEDIAE aisbl) has joined a consortium of well respected social and economic research institutes, cultural managers and creative workers from six European countries, led by the University of Turku (Finland), in a three year long research project intended to reshape the economic and social perception of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). The DISCE Project (acronym for Developing Inclusive & Sustainable Creative Economies), funded by the European Commission under the Horizon2020 Programme, aims to reassess the role of CCIs as contributors to growth, quality employment, competitiveness, and to the attractiveness and social cohesion of cities and regions across the EU.

Through a multidisciplinary qualitative and quantitative approach DISCE will work to

• Develop more robust indicators of CCIs to facilitate a better and more comprehensive understanding of their performance and their contribution to economy and society, both at national and at EU level;
• Provide tools for a better understanding of career perspectives, challenges and training needs of current and future creative workers across creative sectors, including a mapping of high education in the matter;
• Explore inequality and exclusion in the CCIs, with the objective of gaining deeper insights in barriers and getting a clearer insight of enablers of new business models, innovations, employment and growth;
• Promote a better understanding of both the labor markets and the entrepreneurship in CCIs, as well as the role of independent agents as a new disruptive force in their renewing in Europe;
• Provide a new framework through which to examine and support the role of the CCIs in processes of ‘inclusive and sustainable growth’, understood not only as contribution to GDP but also as cultural development and human flourishing.

DISCE, sustained in top-down and bottom-up stakeholder collaboration in the local, regional, national and European context, will build its interdisciplinary research on three pillars:

• Robust statistical analyses, mapping, and the development of new statistical indices;
• In-depth case studies in ten European regions;
• Active co-creation and interaction with stakeholders (academics, professionals, umbrella organisations, policy- and decision makers, …) to validate the relevance of the project and its policy outcomes and to guarantee long-term impact and

The DISCE project is set to start in January 2019 for a period of 3 years. Its lead coordinator is the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship within the Turku School of Economics (TSE) of the University of Turku (UTU) from Finland. The other research members of the consortium are the King’s College London (KCL) from the United Kingdom, the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) from Italy, and the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) in Riga Latvia. The consortium is completed the European network of non-governmental cultural centres based in Sweden Trans Europe Halles (TEH), who will, together with CUMEDIAE, assume both the communications and the stakeholder engagement within the Cultural and Creative Industries.

For more information, please contact info@culture-media.eu

To receive updated information on the DISCE project, please register by sending an email to sthomas@culture-media.eu

Ignasi Guardans, Chairman and co-founder of CUMEDIAE, visited Shanghai last week, in the context of the opening of the “China Europe International Contemporary Art Global Tour”, an exhibition taking place in the very heart of Shanghai business centre putting together the works of several European artists.

With the efficient support of Maggie Wen Xu, artist and cultural manager, member of our Professional Network living between Shanghai and Brussels, some interviews took place with the purpose of reinforcing the channels for collaboration in projects involving creative industries from China and Europe. Among those, it was particularly relevant to meet Professor Ms. Li Jishan, Executive Dean of the National Institute for Cultural Development in Beijing.

As a result, it was agreed that CUMEDIAE will contribute to a research about the creative industries in Europe, with a focus in Spain, to be published in China together with other contributions on other countries. Other possible lines of collaboration were explored.

We really look forward to reinforcing this line of work and promote further opportunities of culture dialogue and exchange.

We are very proud to announce that our project “Parallel Traces: A new lens for Jewish Heritage” has been selected by the European Creative program of the European Commission.

On October 10 and 11, Victor Sorenssen and Caroline Lambert representing The Luxembourg based European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage (AEPJ), project leaders of Parallel Traces and Stefanie Thomas from Culture and Media Agency Europe CUMEDIAE aisbl participated in the Kick Off meeting of Creative Europe in Brussels.

The sessions were targeted around the working methodology for European cultural projects and sharing experiences and objectives with other organizations that have been selected.

Parallel Traces is a cross-cutting, collaborative, pan-European project that offers a renewed look at the significance of Jewish heritage today to create a new window that offers an original and rigorous perspective on the past, present and future of European Jewish history. Parallel Traces, which interacts with content and heritage in an innovative, open and plural way, will offer from an essentially visual viewpoint, an opportunity to unearth the traces of the Jewish cultural heritage in urban architecture and planning from the perspective of discovery by European citizens. The project will discover, rethink, and raise awareness about the European Jewish Heritage as an integral part of European history through different mechanisms: a call for artists, offline and online communication activities, and the development of a new app.

The project presents a well-defined consortium that brings together 8 organisations from 5 EU and 2 non EU countries. The consortium, led by The European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage (AEPJ) based in Luxembourg, also includes Culture and Media Agency Europe aisbl (Belgium), Imascono Art S.L. and local partners Patronat Call de Girona (Spain),Tacka Kommukacije (Serbia), Tarbut Foundation (Romania), Bente Kahan Foundation (Poland) and Israeli House (Georgia). It is a project co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

#EYCH2018 #EuropeforCulture #SharingHeritage #ParallelTraces

On 28 September 2018, a public roundtable session about “Challenging Gender inequality in the Audiovisual Sector in the Mediterranean” took place at Casa Mediterráneo, Alicante, Spain, as the closing event of a two-day training session for the second call sub-grantees of the project “SouthMed WiA – Towards Greater Gender Equality: Promoting the Role and Image of Women in the Southern Mediterranean Audiovisual Sector”.

The public session featured Spanish and Southern Mediterranean experts and prominent public figures within the audiovisual sector, debating on the representation of women in the media and the role of audiovisual output to convey socially transformational content.

Ignasi Guardans, CUMEDIAE Chairman and CEO, moderated the roundtable, composed by Mercedes Giovinazzo, Director of Fundació Interarts, Pilar Perez Solano, Producer, Scriptwriter, Movie Director, and representative of CIMA, Dima Al-Joundi, Producer and Director, Crystal Films, and Fayrouz Karawya, Egyptian singer, songwriter, record producer and representative of the second call subgranted project “Gender Representation in the Egyptian Media“

Javier Hergueta, Director of Casa Mediterráneo, opened the Public Session underlining the importance of tackling gender inequality. Mercedes Giovinazzo took the floor the SouthMed WiA project and the consortium’s efforts (led by Interarts) to enhance the women participation in the audiovisual sector, both in front of the screen and behind it, as well as the desire to create a network of Southern Mediterranean professionals in this field. She stressed that “It is of primary importance the collaboration between SouthMed countries, rather than a cooperation between North and South Mediterranean areas.”

Dima Al-Joundi provided her personal opinion through concrete examples of experiences and advised that gender inequality has to be combated by educating mothers first, because chauvinism is something that males learn during their early stages of development. She highlighted that women power in the audiovisual society may actually be just for appearances since the majority of executive producers are men and the male perspective is still the prevailing perspective. Faryouz Karawya spoke of the difficult environment in some SouthMed countries, such as Egypt, in which the sexual harassment is still a daily problem. This causes a major problem and makes the women empowerment harder to achieve. “Egyptian women are not free to walk in the streets, not only to produce film”. Pilar Pérez Solano asserted that the female perspective is essential as women represent half the population, saying what is expected is a real gender equality.

After the debate, the public session gave the possibility to the audience to speak and address questions to the Roundtable.  At the end of the session, there was an Apéro and audience members exchanged ideas and opinions on this subject. Alicante Plaza, our media partner for this Public Session, wrote an article highlighting the main topics discussed.