The Western Armenian Culture Grant Programme 2024-25 (Armenia)

The Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (hereinafter CGF) is launching the fourth edition of in view grant programme dedicated to cultural creativity and progressive cultural practices in the Western Armenian language. Through this flagship programme, the Department will continue supporting initiatives that aim to create new culture in Armenian.

In view aims to inspire, facilitate, and support innovation and contemporaneity in the cultural and creative sectors in Western Armenian, in order to sustain future generations through a vibrant language and culture. It brings support to cultural changemakers and strives to inspire people and communities to experience, reimagine, and share culture through the development and implementation of fresh ideas that matter for envisioning a vibrant future for the Western Armenian language and culture.

Objectives

• The in view programme gives opportunities to individuals and small groups to create, produce, and distribute diverse cultural productions in Western Armenian. Cultural production is understood in its widest sense to include practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills, as well as instruments, tools, and spaces in which the language is central.

Priority Areas

• The priorities of the in view are to:
  • Celebrate creativity in Western Armenian.
  • Enhance the intrinsic relationship between language and culture, ensuring their evolution.
  • Emphasize the cohesive force of culture.
  • Foster cultural participation and practices as important ways for empowerment and appropriation of cultural resources, and essential factors for the transmission, creation, and dynamic evolution of resources for development.
  • Enhance the immense potential and power culture has to influence, challenge, and transform society.
  • Stimulate the preservation, renewal, and transmission of essential development vectors to future generations through the sustainable creation and use of cultural resources.
  • Enhance lifelong practices for a sustainable Western Armenian culture.
  • Ensure the vitality of different Armenian communities through culture.
  • Mobilize culture and diversity of Armenian voices to foster stronger presence.
  • Give visibility to innovative cultural practices taking place all over the Armenian world.
  • Give more opportunities for gender-balanced participation.
  • Include the youth and new cultural practices in shaping the common cultural environment and identity.
  • Create an open space for all to participate and take responsibility for cultural creation and preservation, harnessing creativity and inclusiveness at the same time.
  • Address global issues and interact with other cultures through Western Armenian as a medium.
  • Use the power of culture to bring renewal to the language and to the culture itself, using culture as a driver for development and progress, as a source of meaning and vitality, as a wellspring of creativity and innovation, and as a resource to address local and global challenges.

Funding Information

• Grant amounts will be determined based on the needs of each project, but may not exceed 10,000 Euros per project in total, non-renewable.

Eligible Projects

• The projects could include but are not limited to the following areas:
  • The arts, heritage, and the humanities.
  • Creative expressions of ideas, experiences, and emotions in a range of media, including:
    • Theatre, performing arts.
    • Visual arts.
    • Literature, literary criticism, translations (books, audio books, journals, periodicals, essays, websites, online publications, graphic novels…).
    • Interdisciplinary and hybrid forms of cultural expression that have emerged thanks to new media.
    • New music.
    • Videos, installations, animations, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, vodcasts, applications.
    • Radio programmes and creative broadcasting on different platforms.

Eligibility Criteria

• This call for proposals is open to everyone wishing to engage in cultural production in Western Armenian across the Diaspora and Armenia, within the framework of eligible activities that address the core components of the grant programme.
• The in view programme will accept submissions from individuals, small groups, as well as non-profit organizations and institutions. All interested parties above the age of 18 are welcome to apply, with the exception of for-profit entities which are not eligible. Applicants need not necessarily be established artists.

Evaluation Criteria

• The following criteria will be taken into account during the assessment of the applications:
  • Creative value and innovative character.
  • Thematic relevance.
  • Projects that address contemporary and global themes.
  • Creativity in the use of the Western Armenian language.
  • Quality of content and activities.
  • The adoption of forward-looking and forward-thinking approaches.
  • Cultural production manifested through different expressions and traditions, combined with new knowledge and practices.
  • The use of the language as the main vehicle of production.
• With particular emphasis on:
  • Challenging cultural and artistic imagination.
  • Reaching a larger, targeted, or underserved audience.
  • Engaging youth and women.
  • Including activities that are sustainable and will continue to have positive impacts after the end of the project.
  • Taking environmental concerns into consideration when possible.

For more information, visit Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.