The organisers of the European Capital of Culture programme Esch2022 announced this morning that they have already approved 31 projects.
The Esch2022 reading committee met on eleven occasions before the end of April 2020 to analyse the approximately 600 projects that were submitted by the December deadline. The preliminary results give a better view of the projects which will be implemented as part of Esch2022. Other projects will be added in the coming months.
Following the most recent meeting of the reading committee, held this week, 31 of the submitted projects were classed as "category 1" and were therefore accepted without reservation. Categories 2 and 4, which comprise projects yet to be reviewed, contain around 176 entries, the final evaluation of which is scheduled to be done by autumn 2020, after which the selected projects will be publicly announced. The remaining projects, which fall into category 3, were excluded from consideration since they did not meet the central criteria of a European Capital of Culture, according to the Esch2022 organisers.
Françoise Poos, Director of Cultural Planning, commented: “We are very aware that behind all these figures are people, groups, artists, associations and individuals who have put their time, their energy, their enthusiasm and their passion into design, writing and budgeting their proposals in order to participate in this wonderful Esch2022 citizen project. It was a great pleasure for us to be able to discover this enormous wealth of ideas, born of everyone's desire to get involved in the Esch2022 region. I would also like to thank all the project leaders on behalf of the whole team for their contribution".
The organisers confirmed that they will contact anyone whose project has already been evaluated in the coming weeks. The Esch2022 team will also maintain close contact with those in categories 2 and 4, who will soon enter the monitoring phase.
Among the 31 projects to have been selected already, the organisers presented further details on the University of Luxembourg project “AI & Art”, which allows guests to "remix" the old and new using genetic algorithms and through a digital journey into a hypothetical future. A second project, “World Tour”, is the result of three photographers and a writer from France wishing to implement a cross-border educational project involving young people aged 12-18 on the whole of Esch2022 and in Belgium.
