Beyond the Urban/Rural Antagonism, Peripheries Are the New Centre(s)

The prejudices and clichés for rural areas and culture are manifold, since the belief that there can only be culture in the cities persists. However artists are increasingly looking for alternatives and new ways that can not only change the structures of the cultural scenes, but also the elitist ideas related to culture. The Tandem program and its recent developments contribute to this while also daring to become active in cultural policy. Tandem Regions formed a group of organizations that worked together over a long period of time with the intention to add a perspective on cultural policy to the network. As a basis for the cooperation, the consortium worked with the cultural scientist/researcher Farah Makki to analyze which of the Sustainable Development Goals were already present in the cultural work of the individual partner organizations and to track the program and prototypes' impact journey. Each organization took the identified focal points as an opportunity to explore further development possibilities and to define which ones were desirable and which were to be pursued. From this process, four of the eight organizations developed a prototype project that built on the previous work and incorporated the development opportunities along with the additional goals. The remaining partners took on different roles during the process to bring in an outside perspective and experience as well as helping with the prototypes. The outcome was presented to a wider Tandem audience in February 2023 in Sofia, in order to invite more organisations to join and to discuss the possibilities of political influence within the European network.