How can we live together?
Meet the Neighbours is a project bringing artists into the heart of urban neighbourhoods in five rapidly developing cities across Europe and North Africa.
Artists from around the world are being invited to take up residence in domestic spaces in these cities, to become neighbours with the people around them and create new work in response to their experiences.
Reacting to unprecedented urban development and the shifting nature of public space, shared knowledge and neighbourliness, Meet the Neighbours asks: how can we live together?
More people than ever before are living in cities. Meet the Neighbours is interested in this new city-dwelling population – who is this ‘public’? What concerns and interests them? How do they meet and interact? And as our urban landscapes swell and shift to meet the needs of their new residents, who is steering this change? Are everyone’s needs being met equally?
Meet the Neighbours is a collaboration between Quarantine, Manchester, UK; La Comédie de Béthune, France; Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland; Grand Theatre, Groningen, Netherlands; and LE 18, Marrakech, Morocco; with Florian Malzacher as curatorial advisor and University of Manchester, UK, as research coordinator.
Each partner is inviting artists, working across a range of artforms, to live within communities in neighbourhoods local to them. Some artists will move between the different cities; bringing their existing practices with them while responding to each unique context.
Meet the Neighbours is exploring the role of artists in the development of our cities and communities, and the place art can provide as a space for reflection and exchange amongst communities.
Alongside around 30 residencies and projects, we are holding three symposia, in Lublin, Poland; Marrakech, Morocco; and Manchester, UK. Each will take a different shape and form to enable continued dialogue and reflection, the presentation of research findings and exchange with the public.
Meet the Neighbours is a three-year project co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme, running until November 2019. Its end will be marked with a public event in Manchester, UK: Meet the Neigbours: The Weekend.
