The N.O.W project has brought together a range of complementary structures and individuals of assorted scales sizes and missions, within a very varied and at times tense European geo-political context.
N.O.W was a 3 year project conducted between 2014 and 2017.
This European cooperation project involved professionals and artists working in the field(s) of the performing arts, researchers from the social and human science fields, based in nine different countries (France, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Iceland, Hungary, Canada, Japan).
This experimentation was made up of 4 interdependent labs that shaped the project and the activity plan through 16 itinerant work sessions in Europe, Canada and Japan. It developed a transnational laboratory platform exploring relevant ways of supporting contemporary artistic practices in their articulation with societies, thus engaging singular processes of interaction with communities.
Through meetings, working sessions and public events, we confronted our respective practices, analysed them from current situations and in the perspective of a sector in transition. We unfolded the problems arts professionals need to work on and from.
We tried to cultivate an alternative narrative of our practices while experimenting with different ways of working with chosen artists, students, cultural establishments and a wider public. We questioned our vocabulary creating terminology while developing collaborative new learnings to access a new scenario.
The End of Now platform is one of the outputs of the project. Through lab # 4, we generated a collection of mediation and documentation tools exploring audience development practices. Gathering data and potentialities – questioning interactive formats and restitution of the creative process, we envisage the arts as a means and a space to share knowledge, experiences, as well as scientific contents.
This process generated the design and launching of this device– The End of Now: it starts with an artistic narrative of the N.O.W project and other examples initiated by the projects’ partners, but we want to push the exercise beyond this stage and engage other cross sectorial collaborations, invite individuals, collectives, to share and add their own projects via the media that suits them the most.
This output sets forth a navigation, it is the continuity and reorientation of the N.O.W project towards a practice-based research methodology that responds to the deep concern of finding new ways of sharing, co-creating contents, and producing knowledge linked to cultural practices.
