An European cultural cooperation project of international contemporary art exhibitions in Germany, Croatia, Hungary and Lithuania, complimented by an Artist in Residence program and a series of internal workshops about digital cultural management, postindustrial cultural spaces, art education and the inclusion of people with disabilities.

Connecting four cities with a close relation to water and building bridges between two ECOC cities among them – Dresden in Germany by the river Elbe, Budapest in Hungary by the river Danube, Rijeka (ECOC 2020) in Croatia on the coast of the Adriatic, and Kaunas (ECOC 2022) in Lithuania by the Nemunas and Neris rivers –, the project Flowing Connections (FLOC) explores the artistic, ecological and cultural questions of waterside living, the rivers and seas that nourish and threaten our cities in equal measure, divide and unite people, nationalities and landscapes, and our caring or abusive relationships with them.

With an international curatorial team including curators from each partner country, FLOC will establish a pool of cca. 160 artworks from and around the partner countries and from all around the world that will be then shown in three exhibitions of various scale in Germany, Hungary and Lithuania: first as part of the OSTRALE Biennale O21 exhibition in Dresden during the summer of 2021 in cca. 6000 m2, then at the Project Space of the Art Quarter Budapest during the spring of 2022 in cca. 400 m2, and finally in frame of the ECOC program of Kaunas during the summer of 2022 in cca. 1500 m2. The exhibitions are accompanied by an Artist in Residence Program in frame of which four artists or artist collectives from the partner countries will spend a month in Dresden preparing artworks in four shipping containers, that will later on be exhibited in all four partner cities in frame of the exhibitions and by themselves in Rijeka.

The curatorial and exhibition work of FLOC is complimented by a series of internal workshops for the leaders and employees of the partner institutions, where experiences and good practices in the fields of digital cultural management, art education, the cultural use of postindustrial facilities and the inclusion of people with disabilities will be exchanged, shared and researched, resulting in a publication and a documentary film about the results.