Talking heArts is a youth initiative funded by the Youth in Action programme of the European Union and coordinated by Subjective Values Foundation (Budapest, Hungary) in partnership with Associazione culturale Fabbrica Europa (Firenze, Italy), EuroEst Foundation (Bucharest, Romania) and University of Barcelona - LMI (Spain). It brings together 4 groups of young music, media and dance artists from 4 European countries with a diversity of cultural roots, to promote creative European collaboration and social inclusion. Encouraging young people to develop a common vision of a future Europe of cultural diversity as well as concrete artistic, social, intercultural and entrepreneurship skill, talking hearts is designed and organised by young people who met and worked together in various projects promoted by the ROOTS & ROUTES International network.

Why Talking heArts? Artists can express themselves in the most various languages and by the most various means, but art speaks one language: so this project wants to focus on the awareness of the creative process, on the teamwork between the different participating young artists while creating/working but also on stage, and on the common, shared message to deliver to the audience. Each participant or small group, representing one kind of art, has to establish ways to interact with others. It can be codes/hand signs, sensors with some programming, defined space on stage, etc. The final exercise will be to combine them in an improvisation-based show. Through this process we believe (we are convinced) that one can improve his/her own art but also his/her understanding of others (tolerance, etc.), and put positive energy in a participative creative process.

Talking heArts mixes visuals, music and movement. The focus and the main challenge is to strongly inter-connect visuals to the performing activities (more common for dancers and musicians), to initiate all the participants to self-expression in performing arts. In other words, each of the participants should experience the feeling of performing as a jazz man on stage.