CENTRES CULTURELS DE RENCONTRE ASSOCIATION

The Association offers Centres Culturels de Rencontre an informative, reflective and work platform on all common issues. It provides new project leaders with a conceptual framework and technical support, while seeking complementarities and synergies with the existing centres.It acts as a resource centre to promote the cultural and artistic reviving of heritage, an original concept supported by the Association, while contributing to increased engagement with its themes. In cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, the Association oversees the enlargement policy of the network and the certification process of new centres in France. From the very beginning, it promotes dialogue with similar experiences across borders.
Conceived at the same time as the cultural encounter centres themselves, and contributing to their common identity, the Association is a networking tool for organisations which reinvent themselves everyday in accordance with their changing experiences. Since 1992 they have been governed by a Charter co-signed by the Minister of Culture.
The convergences between these initiatives are indeed striking: with each monument, a passionate and professional team invents a contemporary and original artistic and cultural project. These projects are conceived in dialogue with their setting, so that they may enjoy a contemporary reality, to showcase their perpetual renewal, while supplying the material and symbolic potentials of these places of art and memory to modern researchers and artists.

THE EUROPEAN NETWORK

The network of “cultural centres/historical monuments” in Europe was founded in 1991 in Dublin, in response to the initiative of the Association of Centres Culturels de Rencontre (ACCR). The network today brings together 43 centres from 12 European countries, and continues to expand rapidly.
The aim of the network is to implement European cooperation in this domain of reviving heritage, to benefit both artists and researchers. Profiting from the experience and logistic support provided by the French Association of Centres Culturels de Rencontre, the network is able to widen the scope of its activity to include different experiences (privately owned monuments in Italy or Portugal, for instance), in order to enhance European expertise, through the exchange of more diversified competences.
In doing so, the network encourages its members to grapple with the legitimacy of development issues in regions where these methods are not in widespread use (for example in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe), so that they may come to be seen as representative partners on these issues by the European Union and Council of Europe.
Through its membership in the EFAH (European Forum for the Arts and Heritage), the network contributed to the development of both ‘Raphael’, the European Union’s heritage program, and “Culture 2000”. It also participates in the networks forum of the Council of Europe.
The activities of the network are financed by member subscriptions and European funding programmes (the European Cultural Foundation, Kaleidoscope and Raphael programmes of the European Union) which together reinforce the financial commitment of the centres themselves.