Refresh (2018-2019) and Refresh+ (2020-2022) "Young artists refreshing heritage sites and legends" is a European project funded under the Creative Europe Culture Programme and coordinated by the Association of Historic Towns of Slovenia with the support of partners from Romania, Italy and Spain (Refresh) and Romania, Spain, Finland and Croatia (Refresh+). Both Refresh and Refresh+ consisted of identifying groups of interdisciplinary young artists and organizing creative heritage weeks, public events and trainings. 

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The aim of the first Refresh project was to explore the cultural heritage in new ways that would at the same time build closer relationships with the existing audiences and to reach out to other community groups which have so far been more difficult to engage in exploring the cultural heritage, and to support interaction between cultural heritage organisations, artists and audience from different cultural backgrounds.

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Two main challenges were identified: 

 

• How can the cultural heritage become more integrated in local communities? Cultural heritage is often associated with tourism, whereas links with local community and its groups are still recognised as insufficient by the cooperating partners. Many potentials of how to make cultural heritage part of everyday experience, how to re-use it in new and creative ways, remain unexplored.

• How to strengthen the awareness of the value of the cultural heritage and its diversity in the wider European context? The countries participating in the project and the selected heritage sites provide a rich diversity in terms of the histories of the places including architecture, music, literature, arts, dance, etc. Each place is unique and the local people can identify with it, whereas the sense of being part of the wider European space still needs to be promoted and encouraged.

 

The aim of the ReFresh+ project is to contribute to promotion of the European cultural heritage and economic development of the culture and creative sectors by: 
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• promoting cultural heritage of the partner countries and exploiting its creativity, artistic, innovation and development potentials. With this project we've built on tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the cooperating partner cities and regions and explored possibilities of how heritage and performing, visual and other types of arts can be combined in an innovative way to help raise visibility and attractiveness of the heritage to different audiences.

• building capacities of young artists for an independent international artistic career and market positioning. Capacity building activities focused on development of skills to work in multicultural teams, to effectively engage in co-production processes, to assess the market potential and develop and test strategies for increasing the economic potentials of their art and creative activities.

• strengthening international cooperation between cultural and educational sectors in providing quality support to the young artists for their growth.