RELAIS CULTURE EUROPE ASSOCIATION

Their core work

Relais Culture Europe is a Paris-based European cultural NGO that works at the intersection of cultural policy, community-based arts practice, and social research. Their core work involves supporting alternative cultural economies, placemaking initiatives, and grassroots arts organizations across Europe — connecting cultural production to questions of democracy, social justice, and civic life. In EU research contexts, they contribute practitioner knowledge and civil society networks to projects that seek to understand and measure how culture contributes to social wellbeing, urban renewal, and civic participation. They bridge the gap between academic research and on-the-ground cultural actors.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their earliest H2020 work (trans-making, 2017), Relais Culture Europe was firmly rooted in arts-practice research — tactical media, peer education, low-tech experimentation, and building alternative economic and social narratives through art. The emphasis was on doing: creating communities, generating practical experiences, and exploring how art-led processes can democratize society. By 2020, with MESOC, their focus shifted toward measuring and evidencing culture's social contribution — working with quantitative indicators, cultural capabilities frameworks, and metrics connecting culture to health, urban renovation, and civic engagement. The trajectory moves from practice-based arts research toward evidence-based cultural policy, suggesting the organization is repositioning itself as a bridge between cultural practice and policymakers who need hard data.

Relais Culture Europe is moving toward cultural policy evidence and social impact measurement, making them increasingly relevant for projects that need to quantify culture's contribution to EU policy goals around health, urban development, and civic participation.

How they like to work

Relais Culture Europe is comfortable in both leading and partner roles: they coordinated trans-making under the MSCA-RISE scheme (which involves staff exchanges and international mobility networks) and joined MESOC as a partner in a larger RIA consortium. Their 31 unique partners across 18 countries from just two projects signals a broad, open network rather than a closed circle of repeat collaborators. This suggests they are well-connected across European cultural civil society and can bring diverse practitioner networks into research consortia — valuable when a project needs to reach cultural organizations beyond academia.

With 31 unique consortium partners spanning 18 countries across only 2 projects, Relais Culture Europe has a notably broad and diverse European network for an organization of its size. Their reach is pan-European, consistent with their mandate as a European-level cultural NGO rather than a French national body.

What sets them apart

Relais Culture Europe occupies a rare position as a European cultural NGO with hands-on experience in both arts-practice research (leading an MSCA mobility project) and policy-oriented social measurement research (participating in a RIA). Most cultural organizations in EU projects appear either as pure research institutes or pure practitioners — Relais bridges both. For consortium builders, they offer something specific: civil society legitimacy, practitioner networks across Europe's cultural sector, and credibility with communities and local cultural actors that academic partners cannot easily replicate.

Highlights from their portfolio

• trans-making
  Relais served as project coordinator in this 5-year MSCA-RISE initiative, making it their most significant EU leadership role — an art-and-economy research project with an unusually wide scope connecting tactical media, placemaking, and social justice.
• MESOC
  Their highest-funded project (EUR 329,375) and a methodologically ambitious RIA that developed cultural capability indicators linked to health, urban renewal, and civic participation — signaling Relais's move into evidence-based cultural policy research.