Crossing Borders

Crossing borders, sharing songs is an European KA2 project. It contributes to an important priority of the Erasmus+ programme. It promotes social inclusion and skills development through the arts.

The project aims to increase participation of migrant youngsters in music projects and supports professional musicians and youth workers in methodologies and innovative approaches about participatory work with diverse groups and the cultural heritage they bring with them.

Concretely, we want to develop an European partnership with 3 socio-artistic organisations of 3 countries ( Belgium, the Netherlands and United Kingdom) in which participatory musicpractice
is the main focus and in which opportunities arise to work together, to exchange expertise, to investigate new innovative approaches, to inspire each other, to test various methodologies and to create a reinforcing impact on the participating organizations.

This project is produced against the background of Europe being confronted with refugees and newcomers and wants to see this as a richness for artistic music creations. Every
(im)migrant brings his/hers own cultural heritage into our society and these influences are interesting material for music projects. As music is an universal language, we want to use it to bring different cultural communities closer together.

All partners are willing to experiment in their own country with different formats and approaches of inclusive music-projects and they are commited to investigate 4 topics: “How can we
integrate the intercultural dialogue more in our music projects?” “How can we include more people with different cultural backgrounds and have a bigger social impact?”, “How can we
integrate cultural heritage of other cultures into our music projects and translate these into contemporary music compositions?" and "How can we make our music projects more
participative?"

During these 2 years of partnership experimenting, confronting, inspiring, exchanging and collaborating with each other around these 4 topics, will be our main working
method. However working with this target group and with their cultural heritage, asks for extra training and development of skills and knowledge about artistic participatory processes. Therefore we will organize 2 learning, training teaching meetings for 12 musicians and youth workers and 1 blended mobility for 24 youngsters.

With the gained knowledge from the trainings, new formats of music initiatives in the different countries will be organized. Through this partnership every partner will expand his own program of music projects and create a new focus. Besides this, every partner will collect special and interesting cultural heritage material from their participants. We will look for a suitable format were all the collected music-material will be provided for the other partners in combination with background information like: interviews, historical and political research-results, different interpretations etc... In this way, we create an online tool which can be used by all partners for future projects, which can be completed with extra additions even after this partnership and which can inspire other
interested musicians, youth workers or socio-cultural organizations.

At the end of our partnership, we focus on the youngsters of each partner and organize an exchange of one week in Belgium to bring them together, to perform the repertoire they worked on during the past 2 years, to make life recordings in our studio, to meet international friends with the same passion and to gain new competences in performing and recording. We end this partnership of two years by making live recordings of the new repertoire in our studio.

Crossing Borders, Sharing Songs is an Erasmus+ Project from kleinVerhaal, Flotsam Sessions and Orchestre Partout with the support of Muziekmozaïek.