NXT Project – Making a Living from the Arts

NXT – Making a Living from the Arts is a 3-year project co-funded by the EU Creative Europe programme (formerly known as NE©XT Accelerator), that started on 1 May 2015 and will continue until 30 April 2018.

This larger-scale interdisciplinary project involving 20 partners with relevant expertise from higher arts education institutes, incubator initiatives and cultural providers, and it is funded by the Creative Europe programme of the EU Commission for the period 2015-2018. Building on the experience of previous NE©XT projects, it aims to support emerging artists to initiate successful international careers and to improve their capacity to make a living from their artistic production.

Aims and objectives:

Young artists must develop new skills in order to access an increasingly internationalized artistic and cultural proffesional market that has been hit hard by the economic crisis. Despite the emergence of initiatives such as cultural incubators and other collaborative activities which contribute to generate jobs and projects in some European cities, there is a lack of international orientation.
In order to address this issue, but also to level regional imbalances, NXT strives to offer emerging artists not only the opportunity to produce and present their works to a larger and international audience, but also to grow professionally with a more entrepreneurial and transnational approach.

These aims are translated into 6 concrete project objectives:

  1. To Expand the Size and Impact of the NEU/NOW Festival
  2. To Improve Visibility of NEW NOW Artists through a Digital Support Interface
  3. To Enhance the Level of Expertise and Quality of Cultural/Creative Incubating across Europe
  4. To Offer Training and Peer-Review Actions to Four Locations (Albania, Serbia, Latvia and Georgia)
  5. To Experiment With and Promote Better Transnational Connections between Cultural/Creative Incubators
  6. To Raise European Interest in Transnational Career Development in European Artistic, Cultural and Creative Arenas

Project partners:

  1. European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA)
  2. The University of Winchester (UK)
  3. Stockholm University of the Arts (Sweden)
  4. Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (UK)
  5. Ecole Européenne Supérieure d’Arts de Bretagne (France)
  6. Association Européenne des Conservatoires (AEC) (Belgium)
  7. Prix Europa
  8. InWest eG – Kreativwirtschaft, Dortmund (Germany)
  9. University of the Arts Helsinki (Finland)
  10. Art Academy of Latvia (Latvia)
  11. University of Arts Belgrade (Serbia)
  12. University of Arts Tirana (Albania)
  13. FOAM, Photography Museum Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
  14. Westergasfabriek (The Netherlands)
  15. Palazzo Spinelli Istituto per l’Arte e il Restauro (Italy)
  16. Design Creative Living Lab (DCC-L), Cité du Design Saint-Etienne (France)
  17. Royal College of Arts, Innovation RCA (UK)
  18. Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision – CILECT (France)
  19. Cumulus International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media (Finland)
  20. University of Arts in Poznan (Poland)

AEC’s role in NE©XT Accelerator:

Together with the European higher arts education sector partners ELIA; CILECT and CUMULUS, the AEC will have an indispensable role in terms of informing and mobilising art schools across Europe. The Association will be involved in NEU NOW developments in training in promoting incubating actions and will provide wide visibility to the project and ensure dissemination of the outcomes.

Please visit the project website to read a detailed project description.