On 30-31 March in Athens, Greece, ASEF will support and participate in the first meeting of the SEAAA Mobility Platform for artistic and cultural mobility with a focus on South Europe, Asia and Australia. The SEAAA Mobility Platform will launch a new Alliance of funding and regranting organisations to support mobility of artists and cultural professionals. The project aims to respond to artistic, directional and geographic imbalances, by establishing a network of mobility funders from ASEM countries to fund different artistic and cultural mobility routes within the Euro-Asia region. It also aims to support the mobility and creative projects of individual beneficiary artists and cultural operators in ASEM countries by running an open call, evaluating the applications, selecting the beneficiaries, reimbursing travel expenses and collecting reports. The meeting will allow discussion on mobility needs and funding schemes existing in each of these regions and will enable participants to define the SEAAA mobility fund more precisely through agreement on common ethics and rules of implementation that could pave the way for possible reciprocal funding of mobility. Potential final beneficiaries of the SEAAA mobility platform would be artists and cultural operators from these regions who have their own projects (that concern at least two of the regions mentioned) and need to travel but cannot find the funds for their round-trip ticket and visa costs. Project partners include Roberto Cimetta Fund (France), Korea Arts Management Service (Korea), Australia Council for the Arts, Valletta 2018 Foundation (Malta), Regione Puglia (Italy),  Arts Network Asia (Singapore), The Russian Theatre Union and Theatre Entropia. The project has been selected through the second edition of ASEF Creative Networks 2015.

« Mobility is recognised by many cultural operators as an effective funding policy in today’s globalised world because it responds to global issues ». Natasa Milovic, Artist director of Scena Carina, Arab-Balkan Exchange Platform, 11/09/2013, Belgrade, Serbia

ASEF has been supporting information on cultural mobility since 2012 with the Mobility Funding Guides for International Cultural Exchange in Asia, now in its 3rd edition. In addition, ASEF has supported dialogue on mobility since 2013, with the meeting of Asian and European cultural mobility funders in Prague, Czech Republic (5-6 June 2013)  and the meeting on Access and Reciprocity organised by On the Move in partnership with Asialink and ResArtis in Melbourne, Australia (12 May 2014). Read more about cultural mobility: https://culture360.asef.org/asef-news/mobility/