The first meeting of all CAfE consortium members took place at the MitOst office in Berlin from October 19-21, 2012 and was very fruitful. It was the first time that we all met and thus got the chance to ‘look behind the email addresses’, meet face to face and exchange our ideas and expectations on our cooperation project, and the next two years,…

At this moment we are seventeen people from five organizations in four countries. Only few of us had met before in real life, so this was the time to get to know each other. After introducing our five organizations and their members, we looked at our joint Grundtvig future: the CAfE project! We discussed our goals and expectations, how we want to achieve them and what we want to do within the next two years of cooperation.

Some of our expectations are:

• We want to share our experiences on the matter of approaching audiences and working with them, but also share our knowledge, discuss threats and difficulties we encounter.
• We seek to enhance our personal development (new people / contacts / ideas / impressions / study visits).
• We want to cooperate within the existing projects that each of our organizations implement, but also want to make use of the possibility to establish new common projects.
• We want to network and build up new partnerships.
• We want to reflect – through the eyes of the others – on the structures of our organizations,
• And we do want to enjoy our time together.
• We want to discuss how to invite people who are not interested in modern art into our activities?

In order to realize this we plan to

• visit each other’s exhibitions, events, and mutually support for ongoing activities,
• introduce our activities and structures,
• organize study visits and residencies,
• Cooperation in promotion,
• exchange content,
• invite experts,
• give each other feedback on the events,
• do some research to find out what it already out there on our topic,
• develop new methodology how to reach the audience,
• form working groups.

To support the administrative ‘structure’ we need time tables and a contact list to keep our network alive, a blog and documentation.

Some milestones within our partnership are the joint meetings and events that we will have throughout the coming two years. During our visits we get to know the place, have fruitful discussions, meet with experts, and also get to know local cultural activities. In 2013 the meetings will include:

• March 2013 in Lleida/Spain
• April 2013 in Rahlovice/Czech Republic
• June 2013 in Wrocław/Poland
• June 2013 in Lübben/Germany
• October 2013 in Leipzip/Germany
• November 2013 in Rahlovice/Czech Republic

In addition to all this, we dove into Berlin cultural life, visited the art gallery Wedding Galerie – Kunst & Interkultur where one of our group members, Maria Reig Florensa, took us on a tour through the exhibition she had recently curated, and walked around several districts of the city.

We had a very nice, intense and productive time together and when saying goodbye, we were already looking forward to meet each other again in early 2013 in Spain.

So, time is running (faster than I thought when I realized that we sat outside for lunch and even at night compared to the snowy coldness outside my window right now,..), but the good thing about it: we will even sooner meet again! :-).

Thank you for setting up this blog, for being patient with my late post and for being part of this group!

All my best wishes to you all, from snowy and all decorated Berlin,

Henrieke

P.S. Thanks to Karolina for the notes on our meeting, of which I included some extracts!