about us
mission
Connecting Cultures is a non profit research agency based in Milan, Italy active in the field of the Visual Arts. Founded by Anna Detheridge contemporary art curator and theorist in 2001, Connecting Cultures is committed to an inclusive approach to culture and an action research based method of working in the public realm.
We work with artists, designers architects and performers, and the public attempting to bring them together in meaningful ways. Our approach is interdisciplinary and cross cultural.
Our aims are:
- promoting collective awareness of resources and potential of the local
- providing opportunities for cross cultural exchange
- implementing ideas for urban ecologies
- acting as catalysts for change and a sustainable future
history
Despite Connecting Cultures’ short history, the research agency has developed experience in several fields working transversally towards the same goal.
A variety of projects – in particular in urban regeneration through culture in Valdarno, Tuscany working with artists and public administrations with an action research approach allowed us to develop a series of guide lines to good practice. The two year experience in Tuscany (2004-2006) is summarized in our publication “A changing vision. The Valdarno Project“.
More recently Art and Survival Programme initiated in Bosnia in 2005 led to a series of projects, a workshop and an international conference at the Triennale in Milan in 2007 and the production of an artist’s book “Individual Utopias” by the artist Lala Rascic whose presentation and performance we hosted in Milan in 2009.
In late summer 2006 Connecting Cultures acquired new offices and library space which opened to the public in February 2007. Public presentations of artist’s projects in progress in the series OutOfPlace for three years (2007 to 2009) have put Connecting Cultures on the map for a wide mailing list of students, art scholars and professionals interested in subjects in and around art, land usage, society, human rights, cultural policy.
The project Imagining Parco Sud, initiated in September 2007, addresses a vast fragmented agricultural area Parco Agricolo Sud consisting of sixty small towns and three million inhabitants on the southern hemisphere of the city explored through interdisciplinary workshops and laboratories with departments of Architecture, Agriculture, Urban planning and Art academies from Milan, Great Britain and the Czech Republic.
location
Connecting Cultures’offices and archive are based in an old watermill, Il Molino di Sopra in the South-West area of Milan, in a little known area bordering on rice fields cultivated within the city.