On Tuesday, 19 April, 12:00 hours, at CREART (Teatrelli), the new directions for 2023 of the project “COOLsound – online despre scena independentă românească / COOLsound – online about the Romanian independent stage” will be announced. This is a project supporting independent young artists.
One of the new development directions for COOLsound is to promote the so-called Generation Z, future artists, who have graduated from art schools or who are still studying for their Master’s degree or PhD diploma, at the beginning of their career or who are still trying to find their path. The event will bring together the initiators of the project, the main partners and some of the artists who took part in the project in 2021-2022, among whom Alex Ștefănescu, violoncellist Cornelius Zirbo and dancer Arcadie Rusu. Other artist will also be present and they will speak about the impact of the pandemics on their career and evolution, as well as about personal repositioning generated by this extended crisis.
The project COOLsound - online about Romanian independent scene, realized by Pro Contemporania with the support of JTI, with the partner The Culture Club – which has promoted, starting in 2021, online artistic productions signed by Romanian musicians, actors, dancers or performers, mostly young people active in this field – entered its third year of support for the Romanian independent artists.
COOLsound aims to become a reference instrument, an online dictionary of the independent scene in Romania. After the first two years, the platform presents almost 50 artists who, when they joined the project, were not employed by any public institution in this field in Romania and, inherently, were strongly affected by the Covid 19 pandemics and its effects on the performance arts. These creators faced very difficult situations during the pandemics, because the artists were the first taken out of the “field” and the last to return to it. By the fact that the artistic activities were classified as “not essential”, the 2020-2021 period placed the social and professional category of the “artist” in a visibly disadvantaged area. The activities in the field of performance arts – including independent activities – were stopped, and the artists who were not employed under unlimited term contracts simply lost all their income. Among them, although they had collaborations with important cultural institutions, many artists no longer had any commitments and, when the activity resumed in the summer of 2021, only some of these collaborations were restored, and the sector had a partial recovery in 2022. Although the Romanian state found some solutions, the crisis continues to be major. This situation did not prevent them to obtain awards at important international contests or to get involved in major cultural projects in Romania and abroad.
COOLsound - online despre scena independentă românească / COOLsound – online about the Romanian independent stage is a bilingual project launched in 2021 and continued in 2022 and 2023 on www.coolsound.ro, which includes representative productions for the artists involved, filmed in a professional manner and presented on the youtube channel procontemporania and on the www.COOLsound.ro platform.
The project contains bilingual sheets with video, photographic and full text content in Romanian and in English, focusing on a solo artistic moment and an interview – statement, multimedia complex presentations, true visiting cards of the artist, which are accessible on the portal www.COOLsound.ro.
Filming took place in the halls of CreART, ArCuB, at the National University of Music in Bucharest and at the National Art Center “Tinerimea Română”, the productions were signed by Virgil Oprina – director of photography/editing. The online space of the platform was created by Andrei Crăciun. The project was coordinated by Oltea Şerban-Pârâu. Ovidiu Miculescu is the artistic consultant of the project, and JTI had a direct involvement in the completion of the platform through Gilda Lazăr, Head of Corporate Affairs and Communications.
The project is supported by JTI, a company well known for supporting art and culture.
Producer: Pro Contemporania.
Main cultural partner: The Culture Club.
Cultural partners: Bucharest City Hall, CreArt, ARCUB, National University of Music in Bucharest, National Art Center “Tinerimea Română”.
Media partners: Radio România Cultural, Radio România Muzical, Radio România Regional, Mediatrust, România TV, Liternet, Agenția de carte.
https://youtu.be/XNvjPO1P9zs