European Silk Road

The European Silk Road app is a digital platform for a wide range of artistic perspectives and creative forms of expression.

What would a European Silk Road look like if it existed? Would it be an ecological project? A narrative of values? Or a cultural participation project? The European Silk Road app calls on individual artists, collectives, cultural producers and initiators to address the idea and vision of a European Silk Road. It allows them to contribute their own very personal ideas and perspectives. Spanning borders, cultures and time zones, a growing mosaic of artistic interpretations will be assembled to take a fun, but critical artistic approach to bringing the concept of a European Silk Road into being.

In a time of war and climate crisis, the European Silk Road (european-silk-road.eu) is creating a major vision of a modern high-speed rail network and a green infrastructure project. It will connect the industrial centres on the western side of the continent to the highly populated regions in the east. This aims to strengthen the European Project in the face of overarching power projections. Seeking to inspire artistic debate and free dialogue, the European Silk Road app revolves around very specific values that the democratic Europe stands for or could stand for. The ESR app purposefully provides creative people with an open catalogue of possible basic values as a source of inspiration and an invitation to free interpretation. This “value index” lists principles that are traditionally associated with art, such as “truth” and “beauty”. The aim is to invite the other to create his/her personal – and strengthen their own basic quality while adding the necessary intensity to positive ideas – like those behind the European Silk Road.

The contribution module allows anyone to incorporate the artwork they create in this European idea, publishing it within the context of this future vision. In this way, hidden potential (i.e. the quiet, frequently unheard voices) is identified, sounded out and brought to the surface. This gives the artists an opportunity to set out on a journey together through this theme.

The fruit of these efforts grow in the app

Thanks to our partners, for example, the Orchestra della Toscana, the Madrigal Choir of Bucharest and the Silk Road Symphony Orchestra, we have found numerous artistic interpret