“The Pop Venue as an Experimental Community Space”

WORM is delighted to announce a new EU-funded project, “The Pop Venue as an Experimental Community Space”.

The project will be carried out in partnership with Dabadaba (San Sebastian, ES), VK (Brussels, BE), Kvaka 22 (Belgrade, RS), Studenterhus Aarhus (Aargus, DK) and two other partners (at this time, March 4 2021, to be announced).

“The Pop Venue as an Experimental Community Space” will look to develop alternative scenarios for the rapid and multifarious changes that small pop venues are currently dealing with. Specific attention and resources are reserved for creating collaboration strategies that engage marginalized and culturally diverse communities in their cities.

The consequences of Covid-19 have had a huge impact on small stages in Europe. Where many venues’ existences are threatened, others are more flexible, due to their small scale. They can find new ways to be meaningful to their local environments.

The project gives small pop venues the opportunity to reinvent themselves based on trusted core values, specifically when dealing with ongoing challenges around the development of new, heterogeneous partnerships and target groups; and those in relation to building public loyalty, correct representation of city communities and the resultant artistic development of the venue.

The result of the collaborations will be a toolkit that can be used for local governments and fellow pop venues when setting up partnerships with new metropolitan communities. A mini-documentary will chart the ways of working and the results of the project. This documentary will be available on-line for use by other institutions and cultural producers.

The project is part of the EU’s Music Moves Europe: Boosting European Music Diversity and Talent initiative, “Co-operation of small music venues”. It runs from February 2021 till July 2022.

Update! You can read the Basque and Spanish press releases from Dabadada here: Spanish version and the Basque version.