The i-Portunus Houses pilot puts focus on hosts, underlining their value in providing efficient residencies and working environments for creative individuals.

i-Portunus strongly believes in the professional value of making real-life contacts across European borders and collaborating with peers face-to-face. Hybrid forms of cultural mobility and collaboration via digital platforms may provide another form of transnational exchanges for artists and cultural professionals. Especially also for those who work and live in more remote places of Creative Europe countries. Cultural organisations and the creative professionals working in them urgently need to innovate and prepare for hosting their peers and co-producing also in the digital space. This is particularly important as long as the pandemic lasts, but also in view of a less travel-intense, more equally accessible and greener future of cultural mobility.

The i-Portunus Houses pilot is open for all 40 Creative Europe countries + UK, and offers a specific mobility support for local hosts to team up with 2 to 5 artists and/or cultural professionals. Hosts can be organisations or established artists.

Under this new pilot scheme we launch two similar calls, to enlarge the opportunities for physical mobility:

Round 1: Friday 21 May - Wednesday 30 June (CLOSED)
Round 2: Monday 23 August - Sunday 3 October

To provide additional support and inspiring space for connection, we offer a series of Market Square Events: info- and matching sessions sessions where hosts, artists and cultural professionals meet, form teams and come up with new ideas to submit a joint collaboration proposal. These events are not mandatory.

The i-Portunus Houses pilot scheme supports mobilities focused on:

• Creating: (co-)creation of artistic work, production, performance
• Connecting: networking, internationalisation
• Learning: increase competences, professional development
• Exploring: research, future collaborations/projects

The scheme is open for all cultural sectors (except audio-visual disciplines that would fit the Creative Europe MEDIA sub-programme). Applicants can propose both physical or a mix of physical and virtual mobilities (so called blended mobilities).

Within this scheme a budget of 500.000, EUR is foreseen, of which a maximum of 30% will be spent on the virtual part of blended mobility. Financial support is calculated based on the number of days spent during a physical mobility or type of virtual participation (create, connect, learn or explore). For more info, see calculation example (red table) in the call. 

A committee of cultural mobility experts from all over Europe will review all incoming proposals. Selected i-Portunus hosts then can proceed with realising their (blended) mobility collaboration projects and individual travel plans between the end of August 2021 (1st round) / beginning of December 2021 (2nd round) at the earliest until the end of May 2022 at the latest.

The i-Portunus Houses pilot scheme is implemented, on behalf of the European Commission, by a consortium of organisations that have been pioneers of European cultural mobility programmes themselves. Coordinated by the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam), the i-Portunus Houses consortium involves MitOst (Berlin) as main mobility implementer and the Kultura Nova Foundation (Zagreb) as lead in evaluation and analysis.

Read more about the Call for Application i-Portunus Houses Round 2