The winner of the 2021 Amateo Award has been announced!
Amateo, the European Network for Active Participation in Cultural Activities, is delighted to announce the winning group at its 4th annual award ceremony, held in Milan, Italy. The happy group that won the prestigious Amateo Award is…
PAMIS & The Arts End of Somewhere!
Their commitment and engaging approach to promoting a more inclusive society through arts and culture stood out from all of the 59 applicants from across Europe and beyond.
The year’s shortlisted projects featured a great mix of art forms and participants, demonstrating resilience and innovative ways of delivering creative activities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The jury members were impressed with the winning project’s impact on the local community and, especially, vulnerable groups. They have faith that PAMIS and The Arts End of Somewhere will further inspire and encourage inclusive practices in the field of amateur-led participatory arts.
PAMIS is the only charity that solely supports children, young people and adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) and their families to lead healthy, valued and included lives doing the things they want to do within their community. They offer a range of projects and programmes including their multi-sensory storytelling and performance work with their volunteer arts collective, The Arts End of Somewhere.
You can learn more via the PAMIS website or via social media: @PAMIS_Scotland (Twitter and Instagram); @pamisscotland and @ArtsEndOfSomewhere (Facebook).
2021 Jury
Anasa Cultural Centre – 2020 Amateo Award winner (Social Circus Athens project, Greece), Saša Strnad – 2018 Amateo Award finalist (Touching project) and Sophie Dowden, Project and Fundraising Manager at the European Choral Association (UK).
2021 Finalists
- Drama Express (England, UK) provides young people with complex disabilities the opportunity to access the performing arts within Cornwall. Drama Express aims to end the isolation of many young people with complex disabilities, linking the benefits of drama to maintaining positive mental health. Through nurturing the individual talents of its members, Drama Express recognizes the importance of creating, developing and sustaining peer group friendships through a shared experience of drama.
- Volksgarten: from rejection to dream spot (Austria) In the summer of 2020, maiz made an intervention at the “Volksgarten” park in Linz, Austria. It was an initiative of the self-organized association maiz, in cooperation with Sounding Linz. The project proposes a navigation through a transcultural space that from a hegemonic perspective is often seen as an area of conflict. Unemployed, migrants and refugees are present at Volksgarten from spring to autumn, representing a social class, which finds no hearing in society. In this walk, maiz proposes a reading of this space through the convergence of sound and imagination. At the end, through the multiple re-enactment of this walk, participants became part of a shared space.
- Toonspeak (Scotland, UK) created three distinct but complementary projects to support our incredibly vulnerable young people throughout the city of Glasgow through: Creative Calm, Access to Digital Creativity and Projects by Post in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. In launching this response programme, the group wanted to maintain critical relationships with our young people and within Toonspeak’s community, to support digital creativity and to support the wellbeing and mental health of our young people.
- People come to Europe from all over the world in search of a new life. This is particularly evident in Brussels. To celebrate this diversity and welcome asylum seekers, poet and author, Sarah Reader Harris, and musician and songwriter, Marieke Slovin Lewis created On the Move: Poems and Songs of Migration (Belgium), a participatory arts project for creative and cultural exchange between longtime residents of Belgium and those who have just arrived.
The award ceremony was a hybrid event that took place in-person at Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan and streamed live via Amateo’s website on Friday 29 October, 6pm (CET). It was part of Amateo’s annual conference which focused on the theme of: ‘European Culture’s Development Restart(s) from the Peripheries’ (29 – 30 October).
Follow #AmateoAward on Facebook and Twitter for more updates from the awards ceremony.
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