Europe Grand Central is a ground breaking cooperation effort that combine grassroots projects by independent culture organizations across Europe and beyond through a unique digital and conceptual platform to connect audience created narratives about the human act of crossing borders. Partners of the project, all solid culture operators and networks, work on vastly varied topics such as rising xenophobia towards refugees in Sweden, personal consequences of mounting economic crisis in Greece, disconnected suburbs and city-dwellers in Bologna and Bremen, political tensions at the eastern borderlands of Poland, and skewed notions of the Arab world in Europe. The methods for audience inclusion to challenge sentiments of “us” and “them” vary across interactive theatre and photography, craft, design, workshops, street art, and artistic residencies.Europe Grand Central is the space for learning across contexts and to develop methods to meet our audiences where they are. At the heart of the project is the continuously developing Bordr digital tool for connection of border stories that will be used in and across all projects. The partners will co-design our action sharing database europegrandcentral.net hosted by Trans Europe Halles, the main network of independent European culture centers, that serve as our communication, and legacy partner. Over two years we will have four project meetings, in 2017 we will coordinate an all-European simultaneous show of local presentations. Our research and dissemination partners are world class universities and public institutions across Europe and beyond.Our aim is to transform perceptions on the act of crossing borders from suspicion to curiosity, to empower under- and misrepresented individuals, and to spread lasting lessons on the art of collecting, representing and combining first hand human experiences. We work to produce an inclusive statement of diversity with potential to start a global movement of connected human values.
