As part of Pirouette Phase 2, the Assessment of Cultural Background plays a central role in documenting local artistic traditions, contextualising the project methodology, and informing the creation of final artistic outputs. Conducted during Months 11–12, this assessment was carried out by individuals from each partner organization who possess an artistic background, ensuring that the evaluation is grounded in both cultural understanding and creative practice.
The assessment process builds directly on the outputs of one-day cultural workshops, where local participants explored artistic expressions and cultural traditions in their communities. These workshops provided a foundation for the assigned individuals to compile comprehensive data on local cultural contexts and artistic practices. Each assigned assessor had five days to synthesize their findings, which were then submitted for consolidation. ANIBAR, as the Work Package Coordinator, compiled the assessments from all six partner countries into a cohesive and insightful document, the Assessment Report on Cultural Background and Artistic Traditions in Local Communities (Month 12). This report, public and accessible, offers a rich overview of diverse cultural expressions across the consortium and serves as the base for the Global Art Fusion Workshop (Months 13–14), where participants collaboratively integrate these artistic expressions into tangible creative outputs.
Ten participants from each partner country work together in a 5-day workshop, facilitated by experienced artists, to produce representations of shared creativity that reflect local cultural contexts while addressing global issues of the participants’ choice.
Milestone 1 (Month 11): Selection of an individual with an artistic background in each partner country to conduct the assessment of cultural backgrounds and artistic traditions.
This comprehensive workflow ensures that the Pirouette methodology is culturally grounded and responsive to local traditions, while fostering cross-cultural collaboration and artistic innovation. The resulting outputs — the Assessment Report and the Global Art Fusion Workshop creations — serve as valuable resources, capturing a wide spectrum of cultural expressions and artistic traditions developed within the project.
The cultural assessments conducted across the six countries provide a grounded and nuanced understanding of how young people engage with artistic practices within their specific social, historical, and cultural contexts. Rather than presenting culture as static or uniform, the findings reveal living, evolving practices shaped by local histories, contemporary challenges, and youth-led reinterpretation. The overall value of the assessment lies in its ability to document these dynamics through direct participation, making visible both shared tendencies and clear contextual differences.
Across the six assessed countries, the following artistic forms emerged as the most distinctive and widely recognised expressions of local cultural identity:
- Kosovo: Contemporary visual and time-based arts, including film, animation, music, design, and hybrid digital practices, often linked to independent cultural spaces and socially reflective expression.
- Bosnia and Herzegovina: Music (especially sevdalinka), theatre, film, hybrid performance, traditional crafts, and folklore, frequently reinterpreted to address memory, identity, and social cohesion.
- Serbia: Participatory and socially embedded practices, including collective movement (kolo), storytelling, informal performance, and everyday rituals shaped by women’s roles.
- Germany: Contemporary interdisciplinary and participatory art forms, including performance, sound and light installations, visual and digital art, and AI-assisted practices, often developed in community-based contexts.
- Montenegro: Textile-based practices, including embroidery, weaving, lace, kilims, and tafting, reactivated through contemporary feminist approaches.
- Ireland: Theatre and performative storytelling, rooted in oral tradition and community performance, exploring identity, belonging, mental health, and social connection.
The assessment ensures that the final artistic deliverables are not imposed from above, but emerge organically from documented interests, practices, and capacities identified during the cultural workshops. It establishes a clear link between local cultural realities and transnational collaboration, providing a solid evidence base for selecting artistic formats, themes, and working methods meaningful to participants. Differences in artistic traditions, modes of expression, and community engagement across countries are treated as a resource for collaboration, enriching the collective process and allowing the final artistic work to reflect a plurality of voices, experiences, and cultural languages, aligned with the project’s broader values of inclusion, participation, and co-creation.
