The EuroLAB program

The essence of the program is that it motivates, by way of a strong Socratic context, an internal switch in the mentality of the individual participating artists towards a strong collaborative creative power, that results in European designs and experiences, or even new paradigms on the way we live and the way we want to value our every day lives.

The EuroLAB program is an art and research program in which artists from all over Europe come together to work, to reflect, to design and to create in a context of sharing. They share values, concepts and insights related to the burning questions of the future of Europe.

Gathering people from different nations to exchange what they made in their national context is not sufficient for the creation of a rich European framework.

The EuroLAB program however is a total immersion into deep level communication and cooperation in which participants temporarily leave behind their national contexts and individual centered preoccupation.

The EuroLAB program facilitates a real open dialog context that rests in the richness of concepts, thoughts and ideas: philosophy. Philosophy and art have in common that they dare to undermine the common sense, that they can investigate presumptions, that they can create new horizons.

Most important, in both philosophy and art there is a strong interaction between daily human experiences and big abstract concepts.

The strong point of art lies of course in its imaginative power and processing, it needs no rational language. The strong point of philosophical dialog is the clarification of the meanings and the rationality which artists tacitly presupposes or the sociological paradigm that surrounds the artistic practices.
In the EuroLAB program philosophical tools are used to go as far as possible to put into words that what we can put into words.¹ The lab program makes use of different philosophical methods and design methods

- Socratic dialog and value creation

- Appreciative Inquiry

- Future scenarios design

- Design and artistic creation