The main goal of stage 5 is to stimulate a public debate and awareness on the funding issues facing artists in Europe today. By bringing together artists and European officials, politicians and policy makers in an active dicussion, stage 5 seeks to grasp and make public the spaces of policy and the material realities of artistic practice. One key focus is the ambivalent degree of intimacy between the funder and funder — stage 5 asks what the current and potential consequences of this intimacy (both positive and negative) are.

The fifth and final stage of AlmostReal emerged from a suggestion to bring policy makers and artists together by curator Maria Lind during the Ljubljana getogether. Maria Lind was subsequently invited by AlmostReal to make a proposal for stage 5. Lind, in turn invited the artist duo Goldin + Senneby to make an artistic project which would be an allegorical exploration of European cultural funding policies in an artistic project. Goldin+Senneby will create a fictional character who starts his or her journey by looking for clues and interesting facts about cultural funding policies but ends up in an metaphorical study of agricultural funding and the increasingly virtualised work of the farmer. While travelling, the expeditioneers will publish the stories of the travelling character in a fictional travel journal in daily or weekly printed media. At the end of the journey, these stories will be collected the independent articles into publication. This research-expedition is to be to presented as part of a public event in November 2009 in Stockholm. This presentation will be give an allegorical twist — adding new persectives and scenarios on the climate and future of cultural funding.

The public event in 2009 is essentially developed for an interested public and key policy figures in an effort to affect the space of policy directly from the margins of the artistic sphere. How artists can play an active, thus political role in the integration of policies not as a reactive voice (driven by pre-formulated policy directives) but by their own ability to set up independent agendas. What are the real upshots and what can really be done?