O'Babeltut is a non-profit organisation in an old village of 2,000 inhabitants in Quercy, South West of France. Its main focus is giving access to culture in remote areas.
For the last 15 years, its ambition has been to reduce social, age and local inequalities, to develop open-minded spirit, self emancipation and conviviality through the meeting of arts, artists and artistic activities. O'Babeltut is convinced that artistic processes and cultural participation can play a big role in rural development, combine with mobility. It works with and for all, to promote cultural equality and multiculturalism.
Its main actions are the following:
- The "Transports Culturels" (since 2009) propose each year 15 to 20 trips to contemporary living art events events in Toulouse (100 km) or Albi (60 km), organised by bus or carpooling, at very low prices. The programme, built thanks to a long partnership between O'Babeltut and cities’ theatres, offers contemporary performances of high quality, often innovative, sometimes in foreign languages (subtitled in French), from famous international companies : theatre, dance, circus, music or mixed arts.
- Local gatherings organised by financing artists travel, food and accommodation, and making them play directly in kindergartens, schools, retirement homes, libraries or bookshops. O'Babeltut builds some mediation to help teachers and animators including arts in their own project, and to mix different kinds of publics.
- They also sometimes organise artistic workshops (dance, music, visual arts or soundpainting) for kids and adults, and build some local events in partnership with different kinds of local or regional organisations (as well as with European artists).
- In addition to that, they regularly send a web-newsletter containing most of all the artistic proposals taking place on the territory.
Its subsidies come from two municipalities. Its team is composed of six volunteers for the moment.
O'Babeltut has expertise on project management, audience engagement, cultural dissemination, networking, cultural mediation and rural development.
Why did O'Babeltut join the ENCC?
"European cooperation is a way for us to exchange best practices, to cross our views, to combine our desires, open our horizons, to build partnerships, to allow meetings and experiences that would give more faces and voices to Europe, and thus more meaning and depth to the feeling of being European.
We would like to:
- Communicate and cooperate with other European cultural stakeholders to create project together and synergy between us;
- Take part in any ENCC research and data collection related to cultural centres, their audiences and their impact, in order to influence new models of practice ;
- Participate in European capacity-building activities for the professionalisation of our cultural organisation"
