Intimacy is the element of interpersonal knowledge “… linked with feelings of closeness, safety, trust and transparency among partners in a collaborative relationship. For intimacy to be sustainable and nourishing it also requires trust, transparency and rituals of connection.”

— Wikipedia’s definition of intimacy

Can art open up a space of intimacy to exchange knowledge between different cultures and interest groups? What about the relations between funder and funded? Or is a partnership between funder and funded always governed by a higher-order strategy that only serves to maintain top-down power relations and thus obstructing any real intimacy a priori?

Throughout AlmostReal, the relation between funder and the funded has been a driving yet curious issue. It has never happened before to bring together cultural producers from the margins and figures from the cultural policy realm in such a close collaboration — not just in words, but in real practice. By looking at the specific dynamics occuring between funder and funded in AlmostReal, stage 5 is developing an artwork and a public event that brings to the surface the economic stakes in the intimacy between funder and funded. What are for instance the real motives and conditions behind this growing ‘schmooze factor’? The fifth and final stage of ALMOSTREAL will explore the meanings and upshots of intimacy in the collaborative relationship between funder and funded and in doing so, also address the current conditions of contemporary art and funding in wider Europe.