“The small team behind Rotterdam’s International Community Arts Festival have achieved outstanding results in the past fifteen years, creating Europe’s most important platform for participatory art and its best opportunity for networking.”
François Matarasso, A Restless Art (Londen & Lissabon: Gulbenkian Foundation, 2019: 197)
ICAF is a multi-trajectory, international program. We are at once a digital platform, a global hub network, and, every three years, an international festival that emerges in Rotterdam, showcasing community arts organisations, professionals, and practices from across the world. Alongside our triennale festival, we produce a regular, recurring programme of summer schools, artist-in-residencies, Mini ICAF festival offerings, and New-Makers Trajectories.
ICAF’s main goal, through the entirety of our programming, is to offer space for reflection, connection and the development of the community arts movement—locally, nationally, and internationally. Everything ICAF produces is built around the idea that community art is a worldwide, cutting edge and urgent arts movement—the only one of its kind.
For ICAF, understanding the context behind each community arts practice is central to all that we do, to ensure we actively build bridges to communicate between differences in knowledge and experiences across social, economic, geographic, and political boundaries.
We are relationship-based people and a relationship-based organisation. At the centre of everything we do are long-term, reciprocal connections with artists, facilitators, thinkers, and organisations from across the broad spectrum of the community arts field. We therefore make it our daily endeavour to nurture this expanding and vibrant network of people and projects.
By participating in any of our ICAF offerings, you can explore unique, community-based art projects, engage in debates and discourse from across the field, and meet highly engaged artists and enthusiasts who make it their goal to bridge the distance between worlds, communities, and people from all walks of life.
As such, ICAF is simultaneously a laboratory, a place to experiment, a temporary school, a gathering, a seminar, a meal, a dance, a moveable feast, and, of course, a hub, a platform and a festival, and an extended programme, too!