Kaunas 2022 European Capital of Culture Youth Remote Workshop

The Brief

Kaunas will be the European Cultural Capital in 2022. Kaunas was the Temporary Capital between the two World Wars (1919–1940) after Vilnius was annexed by Poland. The reality has changed long ago, but eighty years of the pointless and counterproductive label too often attached to the City’s name still haunts minds in Kaunas and beyond.

The Young Curators of Kaunas 2022 project aim was to involve young people to come up with participatory cultural event ideas for Youth Season Highlight, the main event of the youth programmes during 2022. Selected events will be organised along professional events. The role of Holis Work was to design, facilitate and help manage the project in collaboration with the Kaunas2022 team.

What we did

Holis Work designed the curriculum and activities of the workshop based on the brief developed with the Kaunas2022 team. We provided suggestions regarding how this workshop can support the programming activity of the Kaunas2022 team. We helped to formulate the key message for the communication campaign to attract participants. Despite the short application period during the summer we received a high number of applications (68 in total). We coordinated the evaluation and selection process and set up diverse teams using our unique methodology.

Our two facilitators, Dana Olarescu and Michala Lipkova, spent 40 online hours with the 5 teams. This resulted in 9 participatory cultural event proposals delivered in the form of online presentations. Based on the presentations the best projects and participants has been selected by the Kaunas2022 team to take part in a workshop in Kaunas where they agreed on future collaborations.

Participants were satisfied with the program. To the follow up question if they would consider participating in another workshop/summer school organised by Holis 84.6% said yes, 15.4% said maybe and 0% said no.