About

The people of the I.T.E.M. Kulturális és Oktatási Alapítvány (I.T.E.M. Cultural and Educational Foundation) work in higher education in the humanities, in research workshops and in programmes supporting public education. They share the experience that in the over-regulated, hierarchical world of secondary and higher education and academia there is a great need for individual initiative and creative solutions, so that present and future actors of the cultural sphere can gain knowledge that is genuinely usable in an increasingly digital everyday life, and can shape, independently and actively, the cultural environment in which they will live and work.

This is why our Foundation aims to act as a link between the world of education and research on the one hand and grassroots cultural and educational initiatives on the other. Accordingly, our work covers science communication, education and talent development, and various forms of cultural organising. We intend to cover this rather broad field as a kind of umbrella organisation. Our starting point was the recognition that although organising work remains in the shadow of the results of creative processes, a well-functioning personal and infrastructural background is indispensable for them to happen.

By connecting the independent projects initiated and supported by the Foundation, a forum can emerge for the people involved – artists and organisers, teachers and scholars – that allows regular but informal exchange of experience, networking and the interweaving of the networks that belong to each project. In this way, the representatives of the Foundation’s different fields can work towards common goals while supporting and shaping each other’s work: producing knowledge and forms of knowledge usable in digital everyday life, and supporting independent and capable actors of the cultural sphere, reaching as wide an audience as possible.

Our projects

To achieve our goals, we focus on the one hand on launching new projects and supporting existing ones that aim to describe and understand our contemporary world.

In this spirit we launched a book series with Kijárat Kiadó, whose volumes describe digital everyday life and cultural practices in a way that is scholarly yet accessible.

The same goal is served by the online and hybrid talent development programmes and competitions we have developed, and are developing, for younger people in public education. Notable among them are the platform called PAIKKA and our Fresh Fabrik project.

Science communication is served by HIBIKI, a journal on Japanese culture supported by the Foundation.

On the other hand, we aim to organise events and create works of art that take effect precisely through producing a kind of presence that is unimaginable in virtual space. Documenting such events and works in turn opens up a field for technological experiment: for example, recording or reproducing the experience of presence in experimental free improvisation, free jazz or contemporary dance can also be reframed as educational and research questions or projects. We therefore want above all to create and launch events and projects that experiment with such works and their presentation.

In other words, we also promote forms of talent development and science communication that aim at an experience-based encounter with artistic, scientific or historical phenomena.